Irma D. Rutherford Create buyer personas to help determine your marketing strategies. They will reveal who the buyers are and what situations they face. Most importantly, they will show you the goals that they want to achieve.
What is a persona in marketing?
In the context of marketing, a persona refers to your ideal customer. A combination of attributes or activities defines a persona.
- The following are some examples of the use of
- Shopping habits
- Location
- job role/description
- Interest in Product
- Need for Product
Marketing personas are “fictional” depictions of users used in the early stages of product development or redesign.
Personas can be vital for the success of any product. They drive design decisions because they consider everyday user needs and bring them to the forefront before the design process has even begun.
It is essential to have buyer personas because it’s challenging to develop a marketing strategy that will attract your ideal customer without them. A buyer persona represents your ideal customer based on research, accurate data, and other factors. Marketing efforts and business growth are at risk if you don’t know your ideal customers.
These are fundamental marketing principles because, without them, you’ll never be able to offer more than a generic message designed to “catch all” and hope it resonates with your audience.
It would help to use personas in your marketing strategy to make better investments and decisions.
You’ve already made it this far. You may be growing slower than you would like to.
Are there different types of marketing personas?
Personas for marketing can differ from one industry to another or from B2B and B2C to country to country. A variety of variables defines personas. It depends on how businesses track and store data about potential customers.
Digital courses will improve your marketing personas knowledge and help you become a more successful marketer.
How to create personas: quantitative or qualitative research?
You can segment customers based on their attributes if you already know them before they visit your digital asset. You can score them based on certain activities they perform on your site if you do not know. Lead scoring is a common term.
It is essential not just to segment the groups but also to understand their behavior and how they interact with the app/website so that you can identify trends. These trends can cross groups, which allows you to combine them to form a larger group.
Here are three tips for creating your marketing personas using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods of research.
Excel is the perfect tool to download your sales data.
You can find a wealth of quantitative Information about your customers in the historical sales data. Understanding why people have bought from you is essential. It will help if you are looking for these attributes/activities:
- Set low, medium, and high thresholds for spending. This can be helpful if there is an opportunity to upsell or cross-sell. You can reward high-spending customers or offer discounts or offers to lower-spending customers.
- Do C-suite employees buy more from you than executives?
- Location – Do certain areas spend more money than others? Do they prefer certain products to others?
- Comparing the shopping habits of baby boomers, millennials, and Gen Z is every day.
- It’s surprising to see how many people shop on certain days of the week. You might not be surprised that more people shop on weekends, but what about between 8 and noon on Mondays? We have a customer with that exact pattern of shopping behavior.
- Cross-selling and limited-time offers can be tailored to your messaging and target audience when you buy multiple items.
- The country is another attribute based on location, but shopping behavior can vary greatly depending on your site.
You don’t need to create a marketing persona for each persona, but you should be able to identify common trends.
Lead score key activities
Lead scoring assigns a point value to an action on your site that corresponds to how important it is.
This starts, as I explained in my recent article on automation, with a simple sheet and scores assigned across activities. These activities include:
- Downloading something
- Filling out a form or a form that tracks a specific field (for example: if you are selling to the c-suite, an area called ‘Job role’ where people answer ‘CEO” is more valuable than a field titled ‘Executive or Junior’)
- Visit a page or a group of runners.
- Watching a Video
- Subscribe to a Newsletter (remember to unsubscribe is just as crucial for tracking)
You can then assign a score to the actions that you wish to score. This will lead to thresholds. These are typically broken down into the following scenarios:
- Cold lead = less than 100 points. This person may not be interested and was only browsing.
- Warm Information = 100 to 200 points – Interest and near-purchase may require more time but may also only need a little nudge.
- The sales team should follow up on hot leads.
These actions and tips can be beneficial in defining your personas.
- Interview, interview
Find out what made them buy from you. The most important group of people to interview is the sales team.
They know your customers well and speak with them every day. They listen to the people they talk to and understand their shopping habits and reasons for purchasing. Without even looking at them, you will be able to identify the most frequent customers and trends between the groups mentioned above.
Interviews can be a great source of qualitative Information. Although it can be a cheap and effective way to learn the basics, it’s important to note that this data only represents some of your customers. The feedback you receive will be personal and valuable and provide insights that could help you understand your personas better.
Interviews are often the first step in determining personas, but they can be used later to test your position and receive feedback.
The questions to ask to create buyer personas can take time and effort.
It can be challenging to create questions and answer them in a way that your ideal customers will respond. MakeMyPersona is a tool designed by HubSpot that can be used to create a buyer persona. You can then integrate this into your marketing strategy.
MakeMyPersona is an interactive tool that creates buyer personas after answering a series of questions about your ideal customer. It’s an excellent tool for brands, marketers, startups, and big or small businesses.
What can you do with this Information?
You can start by assembling cross-sections of customers to whom you can tailor your messaging and possibly begin marketing differently.
Create profiles that include vital Information such as the person’s likes, dislikes, and shopping habits.
These techniques will allow you to assemble robust, reliable personas that will help your team understand who you are talking to too quickly, how you will speak to them, and ultimately how to set proposition messages against suitable products to different groups.
Imagine how P&G markets Head and Shoulders. Women are sold on the benefits of using the product or its quality.
Men focus more on being active and looking good (using footballers in their ads).
The message, tone of voice, and benefits for each demographic differ. This is a straightforward example of men and women, but it illustrates the need for different marketing strategies for different audiences. Here are ten more fantastic Alexa persona examples to get you started.
Both quantitative and qualitative approaches to data collection have their pros and cons. It would help if you started by collecting qualitative data to understand the market better. Once you have this Information, you can move on to quantitative research to measure variables you discovered during the qualitative research phase.
