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The success of our company’s marketing usually comes down to one question – how well do we know our potential customer? Can we predict its needs, its behavior, its path to purchase? Do we know how old he is, what his needs are, what his lifestyle is like? All this information is necessary for us to create marketing activities with visible sales results. To do this, we need to understand what the buyer persona is.
What is a buyer persona?
In Polish, we can translate this phrase to customer type or profile. In other words, it is a model image of the customer at the time of the purchase decision. It is based on analysis and research of consumer behavior, but also habits, lifestyles and many other factors.
Of course, an online store can have different buyer personae. After all, we don’t usually target our products to just one type of customer. Each person will have different criteria for evaluating our products, and thus will require a different marketing strategy. Defining a buyer persona allows companies and online stores to better understand their customers and thus create products that meet their specific needs. Creating a buyer persona is also very valuable for the professionals who create our website.
What to keep in mind when you create a buyer persona?
Many companies, when advertising their products, focus precisely on the company or its product: the ads often do not even mention the word customer or any mention of their needs. And yet, when deciding on a product or service, we naturally gravitate toward brands that inspire our trust. The best way to build it is to show interest and understanding of the buyer persona’s needs. This requires a certain way of “behavior” – in this case, advertising your site and products.
In building a buyer persona, one thing is important: the goal is not to profile the ideal customer. We want to create a real picture, so let’s analyze all the data, including the negative ones.
Customer model – how to create a buyer persona?
Building shopping personas is a complicated process for which we can use many different sources. Certainly the best of these will be our own online store. Any statistics we manage to get from it are a mine of knowledge. How a user arrives at our site, which subpages he visits, at what stage he ends his visit, how many products he buys, at what prices they are: all this information allows us to learn even more about our customers’ purchasing decisions.
Of course, Google Analytics will also be an invaluable resource. From it we will get no less important information about the age, gender, region from which our customers come.
We can also get additional information about our buyer persona by reading trade magazines, analyzing the competition and doing surveys on our social media. In them you can ask, for example, about your preferred method of communication (e-mail, instant messaging, telephone), your favorite form of delivery, etc.
Personalized marketing message – how to use the buyer persona created?
We have already collected all the necessary information. What’s next? Now you can use buyer persona to give the right direction to all activities. All this information will be useful not only for the marketing department – it will also be valuable for customer service offices, for example. By analyzing the customer’s needs, they will be able to better prepare themselves to solve any customer problems. We can often allay a customer’s fears and concerns before they even arise.
Influence of buyer persona on the website
Learning about the needs of the offer’s audience, as well as learning about purchase motivations, will certainly be of great value to the specialists who create a website for us. It is the thought of the customer, his needs and preferences that should be the basis of every action when creating a website. Getting to know the customer’s shopping journey will allow us to create the right pages, checkout features, payment, delivery, etc.
Buyer persona also allows us to make changes to an existing online store. Maybe by researching her needs, we learned that we don’t have enough delivery or shipping options? Maybe we have too narrow an offer, too high prices, poor filtering options? This is very valuable information for those building and updating our website.
Buyer persona vs. website – use the information gained for SEO
A marketing department or marketing agency is sure to use buyer persona information to build a new marketing strategy and content marketing. First of all, information on buyer persona will allow us to choose the best keywords. Knowing the tastes and search styles of potential customers will allow us to predict what they will type into Google for a particular product or service.
Building a buying persona will allow us to build a better relationship with the customer
The success of our store is also certainly influenced by building the right relationship with the customer. It consists of choosing the right social media channels, the language used on them, the colors of the campaigns or their graphics. First of all, knowing the gender and age of our buyer persona will allow us to plan all these factors accordingly.
Creating a buyer persona – key for a marketing agency
If you use a marketing agency, creating a buyer persona will definitely be their first step. It’s a good idea to have customer information already prepared – analysis of demographics, place of residence and other data. The rest, of course, the agency will acquire on its own. Obtaining an image of the buyer persona will be the basis for specific marketing efforts: content marketing, social media campaigns and other platforms.