It’s difficult, if not impossible, to be effective with your content marketing without having a clearly-defined idea of who your audience is and what’s important to them. Without that target persona, the majority of your marketing efforts will be wasted on people who have no interest in your product or service.
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a fictional character that represents the characteristics of the person most likely to be interested in your product or service. Your buyer persona’s profile includes information gained from your market research, such as gender, geographic location, age and interests. It also often includes things like goals, inspirations, motivations and behavioral patterns.
You may have more than one buyer persona. Is the target buyer for all of your products or services the same? Likely, it’s not. For example, if you sell shoes, you might have shoes for men, women and children. You might have fancy shoes and shoes for sports. While you don’t necessarily need a separate persona for every product, you’ll want to create one for every category of product. In the shoe company example, that would be men’s dress shoes, women’s dress shoes, sports shoes and kids shoes. (While men and women generally approach dress shoes differently, their considerations for sports shoes are much more similar.)
The benefits of creating a buyer persona
While creating buyer personas for each of your product categories may seem like a lot of work, it’s really just organizing the research you’ve already done about your target customers. The prime benefit of using buyer personas is being able to target your advertising to appeal to the people most likely to be interested in your products. However, that’s just a start. There are several good reasons to spend the time and effort on creating buyer personas.
- Allowing you to fine tune your content distribution channels for maximum effect. One of the prime benefits of using buyer personas is that this practice allows you to identify and funnel your content to channels that best match your target audience. For example, if you are looking to attract female authors, you will likely have better results advertising on GoodReads than on Facebook, which attracts a huge audience, most of whom have no interest in your product.
- Helping you get the most from your digital advertising. By targeting your marketing towards those people who are most likely to buy from you, you’ll be able to get more “bang” from your marketing dollars than if you tried to appeal to a general audience.
- Helping your sales team better understand your customers. When you describe your target customer in detail with a buyer persona, your sales team can better understand who they are selling to, their motivations and their goals. This information can help them build a better rapport with existing and potential customers.
- Your buyers and product development team can use buyer personas, too. The information you put together for your buyer personas can also help your buyers and product development team create and make available new products that are likely to appeal to your existing customers, as described in your buyer personas.
Gathering the information you need for your buyer persona
You likely have a lot of the information you need to create your buyer persona. Google Analytics, social media analytics and reporting from your software systems can tell you where your business is coming from. It can also give you hints about age, gender and other interests (from referral sites).
Your sales team can also help give you insights into what motivates your customers to purchase from you. In addition, customer interviews and questionnaires can fill in some details about your buyers. However, it’s important to look for statistical trends in your buyers and not put too much emphasis on empirical data.
WriterAccess makes it easy to create your buyer persona
At WriterAccess, we understand that you don’t always have the time and expertise to create your buyer persona or personas from scratch. That’s why we’ve created an easy-to-use free template on the WA platform that allows you to take advantage of expert digital marketing tools without having to hire someone to create it for you or take time away from your already busy schedule.
You can find the free WA buyer persona template by logging into your account, going to the top right navigation icon (the circle with your initials) and accessing the WA Academy from there. To access the customer journey map and buyer persona within WA Academy, go to:
- Streamline Workflow on your left navigation
- Click on Asset Library
- And find both tools located there
The buyer persona creation tool is just one of many tools available to WA customers. We also offer free Copyscape on every order, affordable access to image libraries, BuzzSumo Light, and Surfer SEO keyword tools integrated into the platform and keyword performance reports. We’re also proud of our WriterAccess Academy, which offers a variety of learning modules on topics like content strategy, content marketing and content management.
WriterAccess has been helping businesses succeed with effective and affordable digital content since 2008. We have more than 20,000 skilled, freelance writers available to help you complete your content plan. To discover how WriterAccess can help your business succeed with quality, dynamic content, we invite you to take advantage of our free, 14-day trial offer. To learn more, visit our Customer Help Center for frequently-asked questions and user tutorials.
