Why Knowing Your Buyer Persona is Vital to Creating Effective Copy

Imagine you’re doing door-to-door sales. You’re about to knock. But you know nothing about the person who’s about to answer. You don’t know their name, gender, background, age, profession, or anything. How are you going to sell them something when you have no idea what they want or need? This is why you need a buyer persona profile. You need to have a clear sense of who your target audience is so you can tailor your message. This is key to creating results-orientated copy and content.

In fact, according to Hubspot, using buyer marketing personas makes websites 2-5 times more effective and easier to use by targeted users.

And according to Dot Digital, sending emails targeted at a particular buyer persona significantly effects your ROI, increasing it by up to 760%.

So, what exactly is involved in creating a buyer persona?

What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is a detailed profile of an imaginary person that sums up your target customer. It is based on research done via customer support data, surveys, competitor analysis, and other market research.

This profile will include details such as:

• Where they live
• Their age and gender
• Their income and profession
• Their level of education
• Their lifestyle and interests
• Their personality
• Their goals and aspirations
• Their particular pain points—a recurring inconvenience they encounter
• Their preferred communication channel i.e. different social media platforms

Often, a company will have a few different buyer personas, especially if they have a wide customer base.

Here’s a made-up example of a buyer persona for a skincare brand:

B2B and B2C buyer personas differ slightly in that, in the case of B2B, you’re going to be more interested in professional details than personal details. The lifestyle and personality of a MailChimp client, for example, aren’t as important as their professional goals or the problems their company is encountering.

Why is identifying a buyer persona important?

Creating a detailed buyer persona is the first step in creating any kind of marketing strategy—and especially in creating content and copy.

Knowing exactly who you’re targeting and what they want helps to create marketing materials that will interest and engage your audience. Creating a buyer persona helps you to understand your customers so your messaging can be customized to their needs and behaviours and therefore more effective.

Think about it. If you’re a tired mum to a 6-month-old who’s been out of the workplace for over a year, would you appreciate receiving an email that talks about working hard and playing hard, dressing to impress, and #girlboss? It just wouldn’t resonate.

Everyone wants relevant content and information that’s helpful and designed to solve a specific problem.

A detailed buyer persona profile also helps with consistency and cohesion across all marketing efforts. And it saves time as you’ll only be targeting people who are actually likely to be interested in your company.

How to create a buyer persona in 4 easy steps

The key to creating an effective buyer persona is being specific. All too often, people end up relying on generic stereotypes that result in content and copy that feels vague and forgettable.

Here’s how to establish a buyer persona that can actually help you with your marketing.

1. Do your research

You want to find out as much as possible about the people buying your products or services or at least thinking about it.

The best tools for the job are:

• Customer surveys and interviews. You might need to add an incentive to encourage customers to participate.
• Reviews and other feedback. Read through testimonials and any reviews left on social media.
• Support requests. Ask your customer support team what issues they’re commonly dealing with and the kind of people who are getting in contact.
• Sales information. Find out peoples’ reasons for choosing your company and any objections they might have.
• Google and social media analytics. Pay particular attention to the demographics.
• Competition. Check out your competitors to see who they’re targeting. You can read their testimonials too for more inspiration.

Your research will throw up a heap of data. You then need to decide how many buyer personas you want and start sorting your research into patterns. You could segment your buyers based on different criteria, such as industry or job title, or their demographic, like age or gender.

Essentially, you want to group your data into recognisable trends that can form the basis of different buyer personas.

2. Write your buyer persona profile

Here’s a basic template to help you get started.

But feel free to go beyond this simple outline. You might want to create a short story-like narrative, exploring a day-in-the-life of your target audience. Put yourself in their shoes and imagine what their day-to-day looks like. You might even include made-up quotes.

Next, you want to hone in on their aspirations and challenges. After all, this is where your company comes in. You want to help them move towards their goals and solve their problems. Any information you can identify about the specifics of those dreams and struggles is useful.

Questions you might ask include:

• Who influences this buyers’ purchasing choices?
• How loyal are they to particular brands?
• What kind of media do they consume?
• Where do they do their shopping?
• How do they generally interact with companies and brands?
• How budget conscious are they?
• How much free time do they have?
• What are their biggest fears?
• What activities stress them out/make them nervous?
• What purchases do they regret?
• What do they worry about?
• What is the first thing on their bucket list?

3. Continue to evaluate and adapt

Your target audience is likely to change with time. Your customers are getting older, after all, and perhaps new ones are emerging with slightly different tastes, goals, and pain points. You’ll need to adapt your buyer personas as necessary.

Buyer Personas: A Pivotal First Step

Once you’ve created a buyer persona, you can use it to inform all the content and copy for your marketing campaigns as well as sales and customer support. With a more tailored approach to engaging and persuading customers, you’ll quickly see impressive results.

However, making sure your content and copy really does speak to your target audience can be challenging. It’s all too easy to fall back into writing in the style you’ve always written rather than adapting your language to fit your reader. A skilled copywriter knows how to write for your buyer persona.

Maybe consider hiring one?