If you’re reading this, you probably already know that buyer personas are important for your brand. Good buyer personas — also called marketing personas, customer personas, or audience profiles — help make your marketing efforts more focused, cohesive, and effective. At E-Power Marketing, we’ve looked at a variety of personas and put together our fair share as well. We’ve learned a thing or two along the way. With that in mind, we thought we’d pass along some of our best tips for creating accurate marketing personas for your brand.
1. Ask the right questions
Good buyer personas start with asking the right questions. If you’re not detailed enough or too broad with your research, your buyer personas aren’t going to be helpful. However, too much detail can cause you to exclude potential customers. Asking the right questions from the get-go can help you walk that line when creating your buyer personas. Once you ask the right questions, you can start to answer them accurately and craft relevant buyer personas that make sense for your brand.
2. Talk to a lot of people
Communication is key to crafting personas. Everyone has different insights that will make your personas more accurate and beneficial, which in turn will make your marketing strategies more effective. Your sales team is a great place to start as they generally have numerous one-on-one interactions with your customers. The team managing your social media may also be able to offer a unique perspective as they see first-hand what content resonates with current customers and followers, as well as handle a lot of the back and forth moderation. You can also go straight to the source and talk directly to your customers. If you have a good relationship with some of your long-term customers or clients, reach out to them.
3. Set aside some time.
Crafting quality buyer personas takes time and research. It can be easy to lose track or focus when trying to juggle multiple other projects or working on them here and there when you have a few minutes between meetings. You don’t want to rush the process. We recommend dedicating at least a few hours of uninterrupted time to understanding the data and crafting your personas. That way, you don’t forget where you left off.
4. Save your notes and research.
Chances are, you’ll be looking at a variety of demographic information, statistics, and research to help you build out your personas. Be sure you’re saving and organizing your research so it’s easy to access later. It helps to have a good database of studies and statistics regarding shopping habits, technology preferences, job descriptions, etc. That way, if you have to go back and tweak your persona later on, you’ll know exactly where the supporting data came from. It’ll also come in handy when you craft additional personas in the future. No need to reinvent the wheel (or redo your research) every time.
5. Revisit your buyer personas frequently.
Buyer personas are a work in progress. Your business is going to grow and expand, new platforms and technologies are going to emerge, and younger generations are going to grow up — all of which is going to have an impact on your target audience. That’s why you should be keeping your personas current and looking at them with fresh eyes on a regular basis. We generally like to dive into personas for our clients at least quarterly. That way we can see if we met quarterly goals and gauge how the personas are performing.
6. Work with a digital marketing agency partner.
OK, we had to put this one in here. As we mentioned above, crafting buyer personas that are accurate and useful takes time, energy, and expertise. If that’s not something your marketing team currently has at its disposal, partnering with an experienced marketing agency like E-Power Marketing can be a great solution. An agency can offer additional expertise and take some of the work off your plate.
Every marketing agency is a little different, but here at E-Power, we can do all the research and create detailed personas for you — so you reap all the benefits of buyer personas without any of the work. We even offer a Brand Consistency Plan, which includes personas, buyer’s journey mapping, tone and voice recommendations, and more to give you the framework for effective digital marketing. If you’ve already got personas or audience profiles in place but want a fresh perspective or additional insights, we’ve got you covered there too with a free digital marketing consultation. Whatever you need, we’re there to lend a hand and back you up.
Ready to start creating awesome personas?
Great! Download our handy Buyer Persona Development Guide to start walking through the process.
