What is a buyer persona?
In simple words, a buyer persona is the fictional character representation of your target customer. This fictional character may not exist in real life, but he could potentially exists.
Trying to represent the ideal prospect mean you do your best to combine the most relevant character you want to see in a customer. This character is entirely based on real life data and market research about your existing customers.
Your target customers have a specific behavior, the demographic character, and the emotions and needs.
If you take time to answer hundreds of questions about your target audience, there is no reason why the content you have written for your target audience would not resonate with them.
The fact is, the data backs it up. According to the IBM blog, understanding your customers’ perspective is critical for the success of your marketing campaign.
Statistics show that 63% of the customers get a positive brand image if you provide them relevant, engaging, timely, and valuable content.
Customer insight is the key – it’s a no brainer! If you have enough time to hack your buyer personas, that is great. But if you are short of time answering hundreds of questions to understand your target audience, then there is always a better way.
However, there are some limitations associated with it. The agile approach will not give you the same extensive knowledge about your customers, which you would get by thoroughly filling out any template for customer persona. It will help you get an idea about the mindset of the target audience to kick off your strategy.
The three major questions
The three major questions that will help you hack your buyer personas are:
- What is the first thing that your target customer do in the morning?
- What is the last thing your target customer thinks about before going to bed?
- Most importantly, why he does that?
These three questions might sound very simple to you but stick to this article as I move forward. There is a specific approach to this madness.
Now let’s dig a little deeper into each of these questions:
What is it that the first thing your target customer do in the morning?
As simple as it sounds, you would have to ask yourself. What is the first thing you think of when you wake up in the morning?
Chances are you might plan your day, you may feel frustrated about going to the office, or you are pretty stressed about a big presentation, or you might be excited to work with a new project you love or to meet your family after a long time.
What is the last thing your target customer thinks about before he goes into the bed?
If you have studied business psychology in the past, then you might understand that we tend to ponder over the macro aspect at night.
The night-time thought often occurs on a macro level. For example, you might think about the significant investment that you are going to make in the upcoming months or your next appointment, or you reflect on whether you are satisfied with your career or if you are planning to make any other changes.
Why?
The question ‘why’ your target customer does so is very vague, because definitely everybody has his or her reasons. If you take time to think about these questions, trust me, the exercise is going to be so compelling!
So let’s find out the answer!
Marketing to your target audience based on buyer persona
Knowing the answers to these questions will help you get an idea about the main points and current situations. Once you get response to all these three basic questions, then you have enough ideas to create content that resonates with your target audience.
Once you create content, consult a Los Angeles SEO company like Drive Traffic Media to optimize it. You might not get the answers to hundreds of questions, including whether your target customer has a dog at home or if he is carrying student loans, but the answer to these basic questions will help you enough to get content ideas.
So if you have a Los Angeles SEO company and your target market is the businesses looking for marketing services, you can write content on the following topics
- How to choose a fully transparent marketing agency
- Five monthly reports that your marketing agency should provide you
- How To Separate Successful Marketing Agencies from Scam Artists
- What to do when you fall short of the results
These topics address the main points of your target audience. If you deliver clear, relevant, concise, and appropriate content, there is no reason why your target audience should not benefit from it.
Plus, these topics may not be all winners, but together they will give you a clear impression about they can help them understand their main points from a better perspective and how they can be met.
What if you don’t know your target audience
Things are pretty simple if you are sure about the demographics of your target audience. In case you don’t know your target audience, you will have to go through a rigorous process to find the answers to the questions. You will have to take time to research to get the answers.
Sure, you could guess – and possibly, you could get the close results. But how about taking time to go through sites like Yahoo Answers, Reddit, Quora, other relevant forums, and industry-relevant public Facebook Groups to find the answers to questions the general audience is asking and the kind of language they are using.
So, if I had to collect data, I will go to the forums and use the main keywords relevant to my target audience. I will combine different keywords to find more in-depth answers and then open up each thread and study thoroughly.
From there, you can easily collect data about the three major questions mentioned before:
- What is the first thing that your target customer does in the morning?
- What is the last thing your target customer thinks about before he goes into the bed?
- Most importantly, why he does so?
Will your detailed content strategy other than the one derived from three questions benefit your target audience? Of course, yes – because having more information is always better when it comes to marketing. The Los Angeles company like Drive Traffic Media can help you with SEO, buyer persona development, and content strategy.
To kick-off your content strategy, you need to find a balance between the three basic questions and time spent on in-depth research to develop your buyer persona.
