Do you have the feeling that your target audience is not interested in the communication campaigns you deliver? You analyse your figures and notice that the conversion rate and the open rate of your emails are in free fall? What if you set out to conquer your prospects by getting to know them by heart? Building your buyer persona should be the number one priority for any business. Knowing your target audience gives you the means to reach them through effective and personalised marketing campaigns without increasing your costs. Find out how to build your buyer persona. You'll also see unsuspected benefits for your business!
What is the buyer persona and what is it used for?
Selling well means offering the right product at the best price to the right person. In principle, you have the right product. You need to know the ideal customer to whom you can sell your product.
To do this, companies use the concept of the buyer persona. This is a sketch of your ideal customer, a fictional but credible portrait. Be careful, it's not just a matter of classifying your prospects in a socio-professional category! Forget the famous expression "housewife under 50". You need to create a realistic life for your persona: even the smallest details will help you make strategic decisions.
Example of a buyer persona
For example, a business that sells bubble-teas will have as its persona Cecile, a 32-year-old yoga teacher who loves to travel but has a strong ecological conscience. She has two children and reads mostly biographies of great historical figures. She spends about 300 euros a month on ethical and responsible shopping and takes the bus to teach her classes in town.
Why does your business need a persona?
For a particular product or service, some people will take action with less reluctance or hesitation. Your sales message must incorporate a marketing strategy designed for your end customer. You need to know what motivates your target or what puts them off in order to adopt their codes and speak their language.
If you succeed in the difficult exercise of building a buyer persona, your customers will say to you " I felt that you knew me very well and that you were talking about me in your situations!" . Be aware that for the same product or service, you can have several personas, also called avatars.
Your business needs to build its buyer persona to segment your marketing campaigns. Your efforts will be rewarded if you take the time to tailor your message to each small group of defined people, rather than sending a global message that really speaks to no one.
The essential elements that make up a buyer persona
As in the example above, your avatar should include some essential elements to be useful in your communication. For example, you can even give this ideal customer a profile picture and a first name. Imagine interviewing your target: what would they tell you about their interests, what information can you learn about their buying process? Here are some things to think about when you are creating a portrait of your buyer persona:
- What are their socio-demographic characteristics? Age, family situation, occupation, education, income level, lifestyle, type of expenditure, place of living, consumption choices, etc.
- What are their interests? Hobbies, love of one's profession (or not), sociability, favourite or dreamed-of holiday destinations, strong values, cultural priorities, music, games, type of films, food tastes, etc.
- What are its goals? Material well-being, spiritual development, personal goals, professional ambitions, family expectations, artistic fulfilment, etc.
- What are their fears and challenges? Fear is a powerful driver of purchase, and you can act on the challenges they face to 'make their lives easier', for example.
What is the starting point for knowing your ideal client?
Knowing your ideal customer by heart is every company's dream. But in concrete terms, how can you obtain this precious information to adapt your marketing strategy without making mistakes? The best solution would of course be to interview them directly, for example in the form of a questionnaire that you will distribute on social networks.
Where to start to discover your avatar?
But the starting point for defining your buyers personas is to start with what you have available. Start in one direction and go deeper into your analyses. You will adjust and refine the profile of your prospects later on.
For example, analyse your community using Google Analytics or Facebook data, look at who your competition's customers are. Explore all the customer reviews (hopefully authentic) to find out what language they use, what their expectations and values are. Consider looking at who comments and likes your competitors' ads.
Why is the web a fascinating playground for getting to know your ideal client?
All this information will help you refine the profiles to focus yourinbound marketing strategy: it is more profitable to get your customers to come to you than to go looking for them in the mass. And you will attract the right prospects by addressing the buyer persona you build up over time.
If you have an existing business, simply explore the database to get an idea of the customer profile you are attracting. Select a sample (the larger the sample, the more relevant your analysis will be) and investigate the lives and habits of these people. Find the information you need to build your buyer persona profile easily on social networks!
Refine your knowledge of the buyer persona over time to maximise your sales
Once you have drawn up a customer profile of one or more buyer personas, you have a basis. You have material to work with for your inbound marketing campaigns. Never rest on your laurels and take the time to refine the information that constitutes your target. By definition, the market regularly changes its codes: your customers change and their habits evolve.
Make sure you regularly investigate your target 's interests to adapt your content and integrate your strategy into the buying process. Here are some indicators that should make you reanalyse your buyers:
- decrease in the open rate and click rate of your sent emails;
- Increased CPM (cost per mille) and decreased CTR (clicks to impressions) in your ads, as well as a steady decrease in the number of interactions (likes, comments and shares);
- high bounce rate on your site, lower conversion rate.
In other words, if you tailor your marketing strategy to the right buyer persona, it will cost less to convert your prospects. If you see this trend reversing, it may be time to investigate the new needs of your target audience.
How to use the buyer persona to drive your sales strategy?
You will sell more easily to a buyer persona that you "know how to talk to". But how do you take all this information into account to establish your strategy and adapt your content to your ideal customer?
Adjusting the communication to the ideal client
Your communication should resemble the way your customers express themselves. Decide to use an appropriate tone, adapt to the use of familiarity, the vocabulary chosen, quote cultural references that will speak to your target, use their expressions. In human psychology, everything that resembles us seems friendly and reliable. By mimicry, adapt your communication to your customers to hold their attention.
Targeting advertising campaigns
Before launching an advertisement on social networks, target your audience precisely, the one whose attention you will hold easily in the middle of a scroll. On the web, attention spans are minute. Take the time to hone in on your target audience to program a cheaper and more effective ad. From the most visited media to the shows they watch to their favourite artists, all these details are important. Also consider the time of day they use social media, what their favourite platform is and why.
Improving the customer experience
Use the buyer persona to improve the buying process on your website. From the acquisition channel to the maintenance of your community, reproduce the codes in which your ideal customer feels comfortable. They need to be in a familiar context to feel heard.
Here, the browsing habits of your marketing persona will be extremely useful in creating a reassuring environment for your prospects.
Adapting the design of your website
Depending on the products you sell, your target audience is different and their contact with your web content should be similar. If you sell gardening products online, one of your personas might be Jean-Pierre, a 67 year old retired executive who spends his days working on his new passion.
As a result, the design of the site will be radically different from a site that sells movie goodies for nostalgic millennials for example. Obviously, when you are setting up a business, web design is not the most important criteria. But when you want to use your buyer persona to tailor all your communication to your future customers, graphic design takes a significant place in your marketing strategy. Your conversion rate will improve the more you offer content that your customer can relate to. And to do this, you need to know your avatar's navigation preferences.
Creating content for your ideal customer
You know your target audience, give them content they will enjoy reading and sharing on social networks! Thanks to your buyer persona, you know exactly what topics to tackle, in which angle to attack the theme and how to respond to your prospects' challenges. You optimise your content production by moving away from generalist articles that speak to everyone and no one at the same time. Whether you go for TikTok videos, podcasts, YouTube videos or blog posts, your ideal client 's profile will help you reach their interests. The inbound marketing strategy is to attract only qualified prospects to you. Moreover, if you work on your SEO in all this content, you will have the opportunity to conquer a new clientele that totally matches your buyer personas: it's a virtuous circle!
Test the product packaging with the buyer persona
It is the detail that really makes all the difference to the customer experience. The packaging is the ambassador of your brand and arouses the greatest emotion in the person who receives it. Receiving and opening the package can become a real ritual for your customer if you manage to communicate its codes in your packaging.
Today, over-packaging is highly frowned upon by a certain proportion of customers. Avoid plastic and go for clean neutrality in the packaging of products with eco-friendly values, for example.
Knowing who the customer service department is addressing thanks to the buyer persona
In the buying process, customer service is a pillar for your business. It's where you make up for bad experiences and improve (or worsen) your reputation as a business. By knowing your buyers personas, you will know which aspects are most important to them, you can anticipate their demands and know how to appease them. Customer service that bends over backwards to satisfy an unhappy customer is far more profitable than the most aggressive social media advertising!
By really knowing your target thanks to the buyer persona built upstream, you will score points in your customer's experience. They will not hesitate to order from you again and may even become your best ambassadors!
Use smart tools to build a realistic buyer persona
As a starting point for your analysis to build your buyer persona, your customer base is enough. However, if you want to take the analysis even further, consider using intelligent tools.
Xtensio to create your persona cards
Xtensio is a webservice that allows you to centralise the documents created as part of your activity on the web: SWOT analysis grid, competitive analysis, graphic charter... Dozens of templates help you to synthesise and share information. And to build your buyer persona in a coherent way, a template is available.
Xtensio is particularly effective, as your avatar sheet really does look like a rich and visually engaging ID card or CV. You can move personality sliders around, collect their bio, frustrations, habits, etc. Once completed, this document will allow you to refer back to it when organising your marketing campaigns.
Hubspot, the software that allows you to segment your target into multiple personas
To manage all aspects of your inbound marketing, Hubspot is the software to discover and use. Converting leads, discovering your prospects in depth (and therefore getting the information to create your buyer persona), informing your customers, improving the customerexperience... Hubspot is an intuitive platform that has won several awards for its efficiency and ease of use.
Conclusion: investigate your ideal customer, it will boost the growth of your business!
The buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. It is used to fine-tune your marketing messages and segment your prospects for a more efficient conversion.
Build your buyer persona
To build it, start with the basics you have about your customers. If you are setting up a new business, look at your direct competitors' customer base to see who you will be selling to.
A buyer persona record does not only contain product preferences and socio-professional category! Ideally, it is a complete portrait of a person. A buyer persona 's taste in music can play a role in your communication, even if you sell office supplies! These interests, habits, references and characteristics will not only help you to feel close to your target, but also to talk to them so that they feel you really know them.
How will your avatar boost your business?
This inbound marketing strategy will give you the opportunity to improve :
- customer experience ;
- targeting of your advertising campaigns;
- the tone of your communication;
- the design of your website;
- your customer 's buying journey;
- the content delivered to your prospects (on your blog or social networks);
- packaging ;
- customer service.
Use the right tools to build your customer profile
To help you segment your customers and compile your buyer personas, we recommend automating some aspects with smart web tools like Xtensio or Hubspot.
Get your business off the ground by exceeding your target audience 's expectations: build your ideal customer picture now. Ingenius can help you build your buyers personas so that you can adapt your marketing strategy as soon as possible!
