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Defining Buyer Personas for Digital

Written by Deirdre Keon on 9th May 2017


Why should your business define buyer personas?

Gaining the knowledge to understand who actually buys or who may purchase your products or services is vital for your business to maximise your digital advertising ROI and content effectiveness. At FCDM, we can help your business with the process of defining buyer personas, enabling you to target your digital efforts and create unique, compelling content that will engage your ideal customers. It is never advised to delve into and invest in paid advertising or content marketing, without knowing exactly who your buyers are and completing this task.

Buyer personas can be created through gaining information from many sources to include surveys, research and interviews of your target audience, that can include a mix of existing customers, prospects and those outside your existing contact list, who might also align with your target audience.

Buyer personas are essentially fictional characters that build a profile of your ideal and largest markets. They should always include demographic information for example age, location, psychographic information, income and like interests, reasons for buying and associated concerns. Additional key information can be sourced from your website analytics, your team members who are on the ground engaging with your customers and social media listening.

It is so important to know the different personalities that make up your overall target audience, what they really care about and what they need, so you can communicate with them in the most relevant way.

Defining Buyer Personas – Our Approach:

Firstly, you need to determine who they are. Information on demographics such as gender, age and education should be primarily gathered. Website analytics and social media listening can be very useful at this stage.

  • Once the above has been discovered, you then need to ask, what is their job title, what is the company size, what industry are they operating in and their general job responsibilities, who they are dealing with and what decisions do they have the authority to make.
  • What are the main challenges they are trying to overcome, that relate to your products and/or services? What operational or personal results does your buyer expect to achieve by purchasing your particular solution?
  • What do they value most and what are their key goals? What do they value the most in making a purchase decision for example price, support etc. This can include personal goals like gaining confidence with peers or increasing their ability to control something about their environment.
  • Where do they find their information? It is advisable to identify the primary sources they use to gather information in their research, as this can contribute highly to their purchase decision process.
  • What are their most common objections? It is important to create a list of reasons you hear most often, for why your solutions may not meet their needs or why your company may not their best option.

The buyer journey is also an important element to understand as part of the exercise, as it deals with who and what impacts your potential customer, as they evaluate their options and finally select the most suitable one.

Having now created actionable buyer personas that reveal insights about your buyer’s decisions and their specific attitudes, concerns and criteria that drives them to choose you, you can now move forward and incorporate this into your digital marketing plan.

Creating a marketing message and elevator pitch that appeals to your target audience is the next step and remember that it is vital to personalise your digital marketing efforts for different segments of your audience. For example, instead of sending the same nurturing emails to everybody in your database, you can now segment by buyer personas and tailor your key messaging in line with what you know about those different personas.

Defining Buyer personas is a vital component of any successful digital marketing strategy. At FCDM, we continually help marketing managers, small to medium business owners and entrepreneurs to customise their digital marketing efforts in order to make a more powerful impact with their prospects and win business. Get in touch today on +353 1 5253188 and see how we can take your business to new heights!