Tag Archives: Build Buyer Personas

June 9, 2014 · 10:19 am

5 Ways to Use Buyer Personas

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Have you made your buyer personas yet?

A couple of weeks ago, the Grammar Chic blog offered some quick tips on creating buyer personas—explaining that buyer personas are essentially “summaries of the individual and identifiable groups of people who might be interested in buying your products.” When you develop a buyer persona, you are profiling one specific segment of your consumer population, listing things like gender, age, income level, hobbies and interests, purchasing motivation, and so forth.

Creating buyer personas helps you to be better informed in your content marketing endeavors. The catch, of course, is that it’s really only valuable to you if you use that information—so what are some specific and practical ways in which you can use your buyer personas to inform your content marketing? We’ve listed five strategies in the bullet points that follow.

Using Your Buyer Personas

Once you’ve made your buyer personas, here’s how you use ‘em:

  1. Address specific people. Sending out an email newsletter is less effective when you have to address it with an anonymous “you,” or when your message can’t be targeted to address the specific needs of your clients—but when you can talk to specific groups instead of the general consumer population, it makes your message sharper, clearer. At Grammar Chic, for instance, we use buyer personas to tailor some content toward job seekers who might be interested in our resume services; other content is geared toward small business owners. By using buyer personas, we can ensure that all of it is geared toward a specific rather than a general audience.
  2. Position your product as the solution to a specific problem. What kinds of problems do your consumers deal with? Your buyer personas should tell you—and then you should use your content marketing to position your product as the solution to their problems. If your buyer personas suggest that your customers are all busy, on-the-go professionals, then, it might be smart to position your product as something that will spare them time and hassle.
  3. Speak to certain values and beliefs. Again, your buyer personas should reveal some potential avenues for you here. If you’re manufacturing food products and you know that your customers are often parents, you can use content to appeal to their desire to offer healthy and nutritional foods to their kids.
  4. Put your content in the right place. Buyer personas don’t just tell you who your customers are, but where they are. Dealing with small business owners? Then you need some content on LinkedIn. Dealing with crafty, stay-at-home moms? Then Pinterest is the place for you to be.
  5. Offer the best value. A final thing that your buyer personas should tell you is the approximate affluence level of your customers—which will enable you to showcase products and services that are actually affordable. You don’t want to promote your high-end products to your most budget-strapped customers, and with buyer personas, you don’t have to.

The bottom line is that buyer personas are useful at nearly every stage of the content development cycle—so get to work on yours today! For assistance in buyer persona development or implementation, contact the Grammar Chic team: Visit www.grammarchic.net or call 803-831-7444.

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May 27, 2014 · 12:33 pm

How to Build Buyer Personas

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At the Grammar Chic blog, we often talk about the need to customize content marketing initiatives to address the specific needs or values of your customers—but of course, this invites the obvious question: How exactly does a company know what its customers want? For that matter, how can you ensure that you’re tailoring your content marketing to directly meet consumer needs?

One solution is to develop buyer personas. Buyer personas are simply summaries of the individual and identifiable groups of people who might be interested in buying your products. Let’s say you’re the owner of a store that only sells big screen TVs, for example. Your buyer personas might include: People who are looking to upgrade smaller TVs to larger ones, or who have just moved into a new place and now have space for a larger screen; tech enthusiasts or entertainment junkies who always need to have the latest and greatest in TV technology; and spouses purchasing new gizmos for their better halves (wives buying for their husbands, more often than not).

In the above scenario, all of those buyer personas are going to be made up mostly of adults, and probably fairly affluent ones. These are mere sketches of buyer personas, and there is really a lot more complexity to them than that. For example, consider Grammar Chic’s own buyer personas for our resume clients; many are recent college graduates, but some are also older adults who are considering a late-in-life career change. These are two very different groups with different values and needs.

Crafting Buyer Personas

It is helpful to brainstorm the different buyer personas that make sense for your brand, and to formalize them—writing down some summaries and some ideas about how best to engage these different customer groups. As you do so, we recommend thinking about the following distinctive:

  • Gender. Some companies serve men almost exclusively, and others women; for some companies, there’s really no big gender divide at all. Where does your company fall here?
  • Age. Targeting online content to teens is very different than targeting it to baby boomers.
  • Profession. For B2B businesses, especially, it is helpful to think about the professions of your target customers.
  • Finances. Are your customers wealthy, looking for a brand that carries prestige and clout—or are they looking for bargains and cost savings?
  • Purpose. For what purpose are people buying your products? This is really at the core of your marketing.
  • Interests and hobbies. How do your buyer personas spend their free time? If they watch a lot of TV, for instance, then TV-themed blogs or memes might make sense for your content marketing.
  • Shopping habits. What else do your customers buy? Where else do they shop? What ultimately influences their buying decisions?

Using Buyer Personas

Once you’ve crafted buyer personas, there is much that you can do with them. Really, we recommend having them on hand at all times, referencing them each time you sit down to develop new content. Use them to ensure you are addressing specific people, rather than making your content too general; that you are using your content to address particular challenges or problems; that you’re showcasing products in the proper price range; and that you’re engaging, entertaining, and informing your readers.

A buyer persona, by the way, is never set in stone; you should revisit and revise them as needed. For more information about any of this, we do invite you to call us for a free content marketing consultation. Check us out on the Web at www.grammarchic.net, or call 804-831-7444.

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