When it comes to inbound marketing strategies, details matter! The right path towards your business' success starts by developing your ideal customer, a.k.a buyer personas. That means doing some digging on your ideal customer to better understand the decision-making behaviors that influence buyers. After all, the only way to capture your audience is by effective content marketing, messages that your target audience will respond to.
But, how can you really understand what your audience wants and how can you help them? Start by segmenting your audience to better tailor your marketing efforts to the specific needs, interests, and challenges of each persona.
Begin the information-gathering process to help you build your personas by asking these questions:
- What is your demographic?
Get into the nitty gritty and cover basic details about your customer. Demographic information is an important factor to take into account when understanding your audience in terms of gender-specific and age-specific roles. For example, men and women respond differently to situations as do younger and older people. Identify your personas by age, gender, and marital status. Where do they reside? What is their education background? Do they have children?
- What is your profession?
Inquire on your persona's career path. Get the lowdown on their job title and company industry. What are their career goals? It may benefit you to learn what skills they possess that fit their role or which tools they use to do their job. If you're selling B2B, understand your persona's professional abilities in their managerial or director role. What concerns do they have for their company? What tools do they use to measure their company's success rate?
- How do you spend your free time?
Learn about your persona's interests, hobbies, shopping preferences, recent purchases. What do they do upon their return home from work? Do they watch television? Do they like to read? If so, what do they read about and what reading sources do they prefer or what TV channels do they watch? Get a sense of their likes and dislikes, even applying key words that would best describe their persona. The more details you collect the better you can build marketing and sales strategies catered to your target audience.
- What is your goal?
A big piece of the puzzle lies in this query. Clearly define the primary and secondary goals of your persona. Knowing these goals will determine how your business can capture your audience by providing them with the solution to their problem, depending on your company's industry. For example, let's say your company sells deodorant. What are the pain points of buyers shopping for deodorant? The majority are probably price-conscious but at the same time they're searching for a quality deodorant that won't leave white marks, irritate skin, or require re-application throughout the day. By understanding their concerns and issues, your company can design a campaign that provides the solution and make a powerful connection from the start.
- What are your biggest challenges?
Now that you've established your buyer persona's goals, no matter what they are, ask what challenges they face when trying to achieve these goals. What resources would they use to search for solutions to their issues? What words would they type when using an online search engine like Google to find answers to their problems? Ask yourself how you can fix their issue/problem.
- How tech savvy are you?
An important element to your research is finding out the watering holes of each buyer persona. Where do they get information? Find out if they spend most of their time online and which device they use for this purpose. Survey which social media networks they use and how often. This information about your buyer persona will give you a clearer sense of who you're marketing to and allows you to tailor your content and strategy to better capture your audience.
Are you still unsure of how to create a buyer persona? Download this free guide and learn how to produce targeted marketing campaigns using the best practices for building buyer personas.
