How well do you know your target audience? Do you know their passions or fears? Their limitations or beliefs? It’s essential that within your digital marketing strategy, you have a profound understanding of the person you want to impact.
It’s quite typical for this definition to rely solely on demographic metrics like age, gender, marital status, location, education, etc. While these factors are crucial, it’s necessary to go the extra mile and add some ‘heart’ to your buyer persona because it’s through this that you can understand what type of communication is most effective in reaching them.
You must adopt a mindset where your buyer persona stops being seen merely as an audience and a target, and instead, focus on seeing them as a person with dreams, aspirations, fears, and emotional traits, so that you can deliver messages that hold value for them, rooted in empathy.
Why is it important to define your buyer persona?
Defining a buyer persona is a powerful tool for your digital marketing strategy to achieve its defined objectives. With this profound understanding, you’ll be able to:
- Gain a better understanding of your potential and current customers.
- Develop more assertive digital marketing tactics.
- Generate experiments focused on meeting your customers’ needs.
- Focus the strategy on the right and appropriate processes.
- Enhance communication through personalized messages.
- Segment your target audience more precisely.
3 steps to define your buyer persona
Characterizing your target audience isn’t a complicated task: you just need to try to understand each of their contexts and create a narrative through them. This approach crafts a profile enriched not only with demographic insights but also with a deep comprehension of your audience’s emotions and sentiments. The three key steps to crafting a buyer persona are:
Understanding and defining the market
The first step in creating a buyer persona is to delineate the market size. For instance, let’s say you’re opening a branch of a chain supermarket in a new city; the market size would encompass all adults residing in this city.
Subsequent, it’s imperative to refine this market by targeting individuals with the financial capability to acquire the products offered in your supermarket. At this point, the market size decreases based on the audience’s purchasing power.
Lastly, you must define the market size that you can effectively handle. It’s impossible to reach every person in the city in our example, so you need to scale down the market considering factors such as the size of your team, the advertising budget allocated, etc.
Crafting the buyer persona’s story
Now that you have three market sizes applied to the reality of your sector, it’s essential to develop a buyer persona for each of these. While you may not be able to impact the entire market, it’s crucial to remember that your potential customers are within it.
Each buyer persona possesses distinctive traits that distinguish them: their preferences, hobbies, frequented places, influences, etc. Consequently, their requirements differ, necessitating customized messaging for each.
What characteristics should a buyer persona have? It’s necessary to include demographic data such as name, age, marital status, or educational level; complement these with insights that delve into their humanity to construct a narrative around them.
For instance: You’re about to launch a new dog snack, so you create a buyer persona named Camilo Rodríguez. He’s 28 years old, owns a dog named Rocko whom he adopted six months ago. Camilo is single but actively uses dating apps to meet new people. His primary sources of information are social media platforms; he stays updated on current events through Twitter and seeks pet care tips on TikTok. Camilo is a firm believer in romantic love and has always dreamed of finding a relationship that mirrors a chick flick.
What conclusions can we draw from this persona? Camilo represents an opportunity for emotional engagement, given his affinity for romantic love. As a fresh “pet parent,” he craves guidance, so providing him with content on this topic would positively impact him.
We can also discern that Twitter and TikTok are the optimal communication channels to reach Camilo effectively, given his frequent usage of these platforms. As a single individual with a belief in romantic love, we can captivate him through messaging that resonates with these communication tones.
Implementing the buyer persona in the digital marketing strategy
Once you’ve determined the market size and structured a tailored buyer persona for each segment, you can begin the creation of content that resonates with their personality, fostering both attraction and loyalty towards the product.
With this, you’ll be able to focus your team’s efforts on the appropriate channels and messages to be more assertive.
Finally, it’s crucial to bear in mind that regardless of your industry, product, or service, your buyer persona must always be a focal point of your strategies. This ensures that you’re delivering a tailored solution to their needs, not just a product. This approach makes it more likely to cultivate profound connections with users, thereby nurturing brand loyalty as they feel “heard.”
