In recent years, creating buyer personas has been a must-do among many marketing teams, but is it a trend that’s worth the investment for your small local business?
A buyer persona is a fictionalized individual who represents your ideal customer, from basic demographic data to behavior, values, and more. If your success depends on understanding and anticipating your customers, then the answer to whether it’s worth your time is yes.
Understanding buyer personas
What is a buyer persona—or a customer, marketing, audience, or target persona?
Buyer personas are a way to individualize information gathered through research and analytics, which helps your business connect with your clients at a deeper level.
Buyer personas contain a component of storytelling, but in reality, they’re the result of gathering and analyzing facts and trends about current, past, and prospective customers. Once you complete the buyer persona research and analysis, the end result is typically a slide or one-sheet that presents:
- A name that helps represent the persona’s role, goals, or traits
- A stock photo selected with audience persona demographics in mind
- Several sets of clumped information showcasing demographics, behavior, preferences, and other useful characteristics
Other descriptive information you can present with an audience persona may include:
- Demographics
- Buying role
- Psychographics
- Consumer behavior
- Motivations
- Goals
- Challenges
Importance of buyer personas in marketing
What is a persona in marketing terms? To start, it’s often used in the plural. In other words, most companies have more than one ideal customer type to capture.
Once established, you can use your detailed buyer persona in your marketing approach to:
- Craft and test personalized messaging.
- Select tactics, channels, and platforms.
- Reduce spend and improve the results of targeted ads.
- Schedule outgoing ads or campaigns down to the minute.
What is a buyer persona in comparison to market segments? While they sound similar, a persona is much more specific than a target market or audience segmentation. Personas incorporate values and traits, even trending hobbies and buzzwords. They’re easier to recall, discuss internally, and refer to in decision-making.
For marketing departments, the ultimate use of personas is to personalize content. Marketers who prioritize personalization are 215% more likely to report effective strategies than those who don’t.
Portland real estate agent Joe Kennedy, for instance, integrates videos, surveys, and neighborhood-specific content into his Nextdoor Business Posts to engage with his ideal customers based on common interests and geo-targeting.
Creating a buyer persona
Once you understand what a buyer persona is, you need to know how to create a buyer persona. Key steps include:
- Research current and prospective customers.
- Analyze research and available data to identify patterns and commonalities.
- Generate and refine personas using a single-page persona template.
- Use, test, adapt, and update buyer personas on an ongoing basis.
Market research can incorporate a variety of online, phone, and in-person approaches. For instance:
- Interviews (expect about 6 - 8 per segment, lasting 30 - 40 minutes each)
- Focus groups
- Surveys
- Social listening
- Web and social media behavioral analytics
See related: ICP vs. persona
Using buyer personas to drive marketing decisions
When you’ve finished customer persona creation, it’s time to return to answering “What is a persona in marketing functions?”
Ultimately, completed personas become tools used alongside company brand and style guidelines to:
- Generate customized versions of elevator pitches or company blurbs.
- Build customer persona-specific guidelines for tone of voice, design, and imagery.
- Steer campaign-specific messaging, storytelling, taglines, and lingo.
- Optimize demand generation, lead generation, and lead nurturing content.
- Pair with lifecycle stages to deliver personalized content.
Considering all of this, what is a buyer persona worth to your business?
At a departmental level, you can integrate personas front and center for more than just product marketing purposes:
- Product development – Invest in customer needs, values, and challenges.
- Sales – Identify decision-making motivations and plan the right timing and message.
- Customer service – Understand communication preferences and common pain points.
Is your ideal customer around the corner?
Building an accurate buyer persona allows you to personalize and define your ideal customers. Although they’re represented as a fictional individual, every detail that goes into them is built on research and data analysis of current and potential customers. They don’t just capture information related to your business—they capture who customers are and what drives them overall.
As such, personas can help you understand:
- How to position your products or services to address specific pain points
- What type of messages should lead in marketing materials and sales pitches
- The role they play in the final purchasing decision
Understanding your current customers at a persona-based level also helps you locate them—like John Consigli, a local plumber who more than doubled his business after claiming his business page on Nextdoor upon discovery of nearly 50 recommendations from satisfied customers.
Find your ideal buyers with Nextdoor
To reach “Ida the Impulse Buyer” or “Budget Barney” in your local market, set up a free Business Page, use Business Posts to interact with your community, and leverage Nextdoor Ads to promote special offers to your ideal clients. You can easily set up campaigns that will result in rich data using the Nextdoor Ads Manager.
Begin using Nextdoor Ads Manager today and start reaching your ideal customers today.
Sources:
- HubSpot. The 2024 State of Marketing & Trends Report: Data from 1400+ Global Marketers. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/hubspot-blog-marketing-industry-trends-report
- Buyer Persona Institute. What is a Buyer Persona, Why it Matters & How to Create Yours. https://buyerpersona.com/what-is-a-buyer-persona
