How to Determine Your Ideal Client
A buyer persona is a fictitious description of your “ideal customer,” for the purpose of figuring out how to market to your best audience. The persona is based on demographics and other data you collect, as well as educated guesses about your customers’ behaviors and lifestyle.
How to get started with building buyer personas
In order to identify your buyer persona, you need to research current and former customers as well as potential customers. Surveys and interviews will help you find out who your customers are, what they value and what solutions they need.
Here are the key details that you’ll need to define about each fictional character in your marketing audience:
Demographics - age, gender, income, location
Professional information - job title, company size, industry, goals and challenges
Learning patterns - where they spend time online to learn about new topics
Behaviours - hobbies, interests, why they like what they like, relevant buzzwords, values, what turns your buyer on and off
Purchasing criteria - how they make decisions about what they buy
Pain points and the customer’s journey - what needs they have as they get to know your solution
After you have identified your buyer persona, create a story to tell your marketing team. Your persona should ideally have a picture and a name, along with some kind of life story and personality quirk details that make him or her seem real.
Once you’ve got one persona built, consider adding more. Focus on one persona or just a few. Don’t be tempted to create ten different ones - that will only lead to confusion and mixed marketing messages.
However, remember that buyer personas are works in progress and need to be reviewed regularly and revised as you learn more about your real audience. Continually updating your personas based on the latest research and data keeps your marketing efforts focused on the correct audience.
What to do with your personas
Your buyer personas should drive all of your marketing efforts from here on in, with all content creation aimed at addressing the needs and preferences of the personas. Decide how you will describe your solution to your personas and use that language throughout.
Choose your marketing strategies and tactics according to the information you have gathered about your buyer. For instance, if your buyer flips through his emails while riding the subway to work and then ignores them for the rest of the day, schedule your email to pop up in his inbox at 8:00 AM. If your buyer is connected only when her baby is asleep, send emails in the early afternoon or in the evening.
When designing a website, your buyer persona is likewise key. Understand what your customer is looking for when he comes to your website and what information is most useful to him. Content which is of most interest to your readers should be placed in the top navigation so it is easy to find.
