Ask yourself, who exactly is my target audience? How can you speak to them about your products in way that will attract them as both leads and customers?
Buyer personas are fictional, generalized characters that build a picture of your ideal and largest markets. These personas help you better understand your core customers, so you can better market to them.
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They usually encompass not only demographic information like age, location, and income, but also psychographic information like their interests, pain points, reasons for buying, and concerns.
Let's take a look at how to effectively build buyer personas for your online business. The following examples will help you laser target your ads and create more compelling content that will engage your ideal customers.
Let's face it. The Internet is crowded and businesses need a better way to market to consumers, especially online retail companies. The first place to start? Building effective buyer personas.
Creating buyer personas has become increasingly useful for smaller online retailers. But where do you begin?
Start broad and then you can drill down into more specifics. Let's use a fictitious online business that manufactures and sells graphic t-shirts for women and call it Taylor’s Tees. Because our fictitious t-shirt company manufactures their own shirts, it's easy to spot two potential groups of buyers:
Buyer Group 1
Consumers - These are customers that are purchasing for themselves or as a gift for another person.
Buyer Group 2
Wholesale buyers- This would include wholesale buyers from other businesses that may want to sell graphic t-shirts in their own retail and online stores.
Now, we can break these broad groups down further. The first group, Consumers, can definitely be broken down into:
Once these buyer personas are defined, it’s time to identify some key information about them. There’s a lot of possible information you could research, use, and define. However, a great place to start is finding out what information you can use.
Here are some of the major elements to define for each of personas:
Learn more about how to build buyer personas for your retail store in this article from Shopify.
You need to ask these types of questions so you can better understand your customers. Once you get to know them, you'll be able to effectively communicate to them. And you'll be able to target your ads more precisely. Also, it's important to note products purchased as gifts.
To understand your personas psychographics in depth, your best bet is to talk to your existing customers. The most effective way to do this research is to pick up the phone and call them or by surveying your customers with a tool like Survey Monkey.
The last thing to do is to make the persona come alive and humanize it. This is typically done by giving the persona a name and photo. You can use an online name generator and use images on LinkedIn or Google Images as long as your personas are for internal use only.
With all of your buyer personas defined, you should now have a much better idea of who, how, and where you should be marketing to achieve the greatest level of success. From increased engagement on your social media channels to a greater ROI for your online ads, taking the time upfront to define your buyer personas can help your online business succeed by better knowing and understanding your core customers – the people who, essentially, constitute your business.
Your buyer personas will change as you discover more information about your major types of customers and what motivates them. It’s necessary to keep learning as much as you can about your personas. As you learn more, don't forget to go back and continually re-define your buyer personas to ensure you're targeting your potential customers most effectively.
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