5 Essential Questions to Define Your Buyer Persona

Buyer personas are essential to know your target audience and run successful marketing campaigns. The five questions below will help you define your buyer persona.

Do you know how many brands create their digital marketing strategies without knowing their audience? According to the research, nearly half of businesses in 2017 were marketing their brand without a plan. So can you guess what outcomes these unplanned marketing strategies drive?

Not knowing buyer personas is one of the primary reasons marketing efforts fail. That’s because targeting everyone in your strategy means targeting no one. As a result, none of your prospective clients might learn about your products or services when you don’t use targeting.

The internet allows us to reach everyone, but we shouldn’t even try to sell our products to all internet users. Even if your product is a loaf of bread, not everyone will need or want it. Some potential consumers might have celiac disease, not like bread, be on a restrictive diet, or find your loaf of bread too expensive. You will spend too much money and energy on failed marketing strategies when you try to target everyone. For this reason, defining your buyer persona is crucial to growing your business.

However, it can get tricky. Sometimes you create your brand with passion and enthusiasm to serve one group of people and base your buyer persona on them. But then reality happens, and you end up selling products to a completely different segment of buyers. So, how do you know who needs your products? Even though it might seem challenging at first, defining your buyer persona is easier than you think when you know to ask the right questions. Below are seven essential questions to help you define who you’re selling to.

 

Who is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is like an archetype of your ideal customers. You create this character to represent the prospective buyers who need your products.

Did you know that 90% of companies understand their buyers better because of their buyer personas, and 56% of businesses have developed higher quality leads using them, according to the statistics?

Are you a wellness brand selling supplements online?

Your buyer persona can be Charlie. Let’s see a sample of his persona:

Personal Information

Charlie is a 35-year-old lawyer, married with two kids. He has a Master’s degree in business & commercial law. Charlie is fit and health-conscious regarding nutrition, supplements, fitness gadgets, and sleep quality.

Work

Charlie works as a senior corporate lawyer. His annual income is $114,000. Charlie’s primary role is to safeguard the legality of the company’s commercial transactions and supervise the legal team.

Online Behaviors

1. Uses Google to find reliable brands
2. Reads online reviews and compares products before making a decision
3. He looks up any new brands on various online channels (social  media, review websites, company website) before he forms an opinion
4. Actively uses email
5. Trusts companies that are active on social media and engage with their customers

Goals

With a busy schedule, Charlie’s goal is to find a life & work balance and spend more quality time with his family. He wants to have optimal focus during work hours and fully relax when at home. In addition, Charlie is invested in his and his family’s health and well-being.

Challenges

Charlie works long office hours and has a rather stressful job. As a result, he has very little free time and often feels guilty that he doesn’t spend enough time with his family.

Needs

Charlie is searching for organic wellness supplements he and his family can use daily. He hopes to find something that helps him focus, boost memory, and also help him relax and alleviate stress.

What Can Your Company Do?

First of all, there is a need for ample information that is easy to find, as well as convenient, fast service. With Charlie’s demand for quality, your company needs to have plenty of product information on all media channels from production, use, independent lab test results for the products, testimonials, and more. Fast delivery and an easy online shopping experience are key as well. And since Charlie doesn’t seem to have time to shop in-person, online ads and email marketing are key to getting his attention.

Why Is it Important?

A buyer persona is crucial to identify your target audience to achieve desired goals and measure your campaign’s success.

Even if you work with the best marketers out of them all, they’ll have trouble promoting your products without knowing whom to target. Creating a simple social media ad requires your audience’s basic information, such as demographics and interests, to create a successful ad campaign. So it’s crucial for every aspect of your digital marketing plan, especially content marketing.

Although crucial, it’s more important to do it correctly. Creating a buyer persona solely out of your creativity will not help you reach your real targeted audience, so the questions below will help you define who your customers are.

You can use these questions first to ask yourself and then create surveys for your customers and prospective buyers to collect necessary data for defining your buyer persona – or several of them.

What Are Their Demographics?

The demographic information of your buyer persona can be broad or very specific, depending on your company’s goals.

If your product is age-specific, like an anti-wrinkle cream for the face, you will need to define the age group of seniors who are more likely to deal with the problem. If your product is a natural supplement like Vitamin D, which anyone can use regardless of age, then you can expand the range of your buyer persona’s age. If you think an education level can play a role in defining your buyer persona (it can, especially in your content marketing), ask about it too. Other information, such as income, can affect their spending, and marital status can influence their buying decisions. You can use location information to know if they live in the area you serve.

The questions you can use in your survey include:

• How old are you?
• What gender do you identify as? (Remember to include “prefer not to say” as an option.)
• What’s your ethnicity? (Again, include “prefer not to say” as an option.)
• What is your zip code?
• What’s your education level?
• Are you married?
• What’s your employment status?

And other similar questions based on what’s essential to your business and what products you sell.

What are Their Behaviors?

Consumer behaviors help you understand how they find your products and the best channels to target them. The questions you can ask in this section include:

• Do you use the internet to find products to buy?
• Which channels do you use to find information online?
• Are you more likely to buy a product from a Google search or a social media Ad?
• After learning about them on social media, do you search for brands on other platforms like Google?
• Describe how you found the item you last purchased online

And although there are countless questions you can ask in this section, try not to overwhelm your respondents and get the answers to the most crucial questions that matter to your company.

What Are Their Challenges?

Customers buy your products, not for the sake of spending money, but to solve their problems. So, one of the crucial aspects of defining your buyer personas is understanding the challenges they face. For instance, when you sell wellness supplements, you can ask the following questions:

• What is the primary motivation for you to take supplements? (While some want to increase their nutrient intake, others believe it can improve their health. Knowing this can help you use the right marketing tactics.)
• What is the common problem you encounter while shopping for wellness supplements? (For example, maybe they can’t find organic supplements, or there’s no proof for quality for most products.)
• What is your biggest concern when shopping for supplements online?

Why Do They Do Business With You?

Many of your respondents are already your customers or are very likely to buy products from you. Understanding what attracts them to your business is key to attracting more customers in the future. Some of the questions you can ask here are:

• How did you learn about our business/products?
• What was the motivation behind purchasing our product?
• Name the primary reason(s) why you chose our company over others.
• How can we improve our products/online experience in our store?

How Do They Buy Products Online?

Knowing how your customers or prospects make purchasing decisions will help you convert more leads to your customers. The questions you can ask here include:

• What is the primary factor that determines your trust in a brand?
• What influences your buying decision the most? (price, assortment, delivery, etc.)
• What are the primary reasons you decide not to buy a product?

Defining a buyer persona will help your marketing and sales team target the right audience, create the appropriate content, help convert more leads to your customers, and retain existing customers. We hope the questions above will help you create buyer personas for your company so that you can divert your marketing efforts in the right direction. If you need help steering your marketing wheel, don’t hesitate to reach out to Internet Marketing Geeks today! We’ll be happy to answer your questions and help your business take the proper steps to get more customers and grow successfully