Posted by Melanie Tajaard ● Mon, Oct 15, 2018 @ 14:10 PM

Creating Buyer Personas to Guide your Inbound Marketing

As a marketer you can’t be all things to all people. It can be helpful to get to know who you are selling to and who you aren’t. That is, the need to pinpoint exactly the kind of audience that is relevant to whatever products or services you are offering. This is where consumer psychographics come in.

Image 2-1According to Chron.com, a consumer psychographic is “a profile of a potential customer based on interests, activities, and opinions. It is a snapshot into a consumer’s lifestyle organizations often used to quickly identify potential customers.” In other words, psychographics explain why someone buys.

Hubspot says that to effectively reach the target audience, a marketer needs to understand both the audiences’ demographics and psychographics. Demographics being who your audience are, that is, age, gender etc, the dry facts about them. A combination of demographics and psychographics form a buyer persona: a semi-fictional representation of the ideal customer.

If not the most important, buyer personas are one of the most important parts of any marketing strategy. For those who are skeptical of this, here’s why they are so important:

  • Without them, marketers wouldn’t know what content to create. The whole purpose of constructing a buyer persona is to know who exactly to attract. Many businesses are struggling to understand the new buying behaviors of today or how to even keep up with them. Buyer personas highlight who the buyer is, their situation, how the situation has changed, and what they want to achieve/ satisfy.
  • Trust and interest are the heart of marketing. Buyer personas allow marketers to identify their customer’s pain points and focus marketing power on providing solutions. With the right content, engagement with potential customers remains relevant. Without it, trust as well as interest is lost and there’s nothing like making first impressions twice.

How to create buyer personas

Those who have been near the world of marketing know buyer persona is a term thrown around casually as if everyone knows about it. As it turns out, creating one is just as simple. Hubspot advises marketers to go about creating buyer personas through:

  • Research
  • Surveys
  • Interviews

To gather the relevant information, they offer the following methods:

  • Going through contact databases to uncover trends about how customers find and consume your content
  • Incorporating form fields on website forms to capture important personal information
  • Sales teams feedback on who they interact with most
  • Interviewing customers, prospects, third party networks, and even referrals
  • Making use of behind-the-scenes website analytics

After the data gathering process, marketers are left with raw but rich data about potential customers. The big question is often what to do with it. Often, the next step is usually to identify common interests and patterns among the interviewees. However, filtering all this information is never that easy or straightforward.

More in Store Marketing has come up with a free and downloadable template to create a buyer persona. The template organizes information gathered and then shares the created personas with the rest of the company. We understand that getting the psychographic data is important but what’s even more important is how to apply it to marketing. With our help, we make the data effective to marketing efforts across various fields.

How to create buyer personas for your business

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