Understanding Buyer Personas: A Marketer’s Guide

In Inbound Marketing*, it is important for your landing page to not just be found by people, but by the right people. By this, I mean the people most likely to become sales leads. Your buyer personas are a personalization of your ideal customers to build your business around.

For example, if you were in charge of marketing for a tour company, you would have to cater to several types of buyer personas such as: adventurous backpackers, vacationing families, newlywed couples, travelling retirees etc. These would be your buyer personas as they would be your most ideal customers you would like to reach out to. How you market your product towards each buyer persona will differ to meet their respective needs.

Identifying and catering to your buyer persona can be done through 3 steps:

1) Interviewing
2) Profiling
3) Marketing

Interviewing

If you have identified certain types of people as your buyer personas, select a large enough sample size for you to interview. Ask your buyers a series of broad, open-ended questions so that you can get a better idea of who they are, so that you can better market your product to them.

Profiling

Once you have gathered enough information on each buyer type, create a profile for it by personifying the collective attributes of the particular type of buyers. This includes giving them a name and an image. For instance, if you are marketing for a tour company, you may have a profile known as ‘Family Man Fred’ for the man travelling with his family. This helps the marketer to have a clearer direction of whom they are marketing the product to, This can be very useful in Inbound Marketing, which revolves around the consumer.

Marketing

Now that you have identified your buyer personas, you are able to better understand your products from the buyers’ perspective, as you are aware of their needs and interests. Before undergoing a campaign, ask yourself what your particular buyer persona would think about it, and evaluate it from there. The profiling of buyers allows marketing strategies to be better planned around these people.

Inbound marketing is planned around the buyers themselves, and has a greater level of interaction between the marketers and the people they are marketing to as compared to traditional, outbound marketing, which merely talks about products. Hence, buyer personas are a vital component of Inbound marketing campaigns.

* Inbound marketing is a form of digital marketing that involves SEO, Social Media, blog and landing pages to generate sales leads.