The success of any sales campaign depends on understanding your audience - and defining your audience begins with customer personas. If your business uses digital marketing to drive customer traffic to your website, creating a profile of your ideal customer and developing a range of personas or avatars can be incredibly effective. Client avatars can also be helpful in other areas of your sales strategy, such as your customer success department or your sales team. 

These personas are semi-fictional characters, representations of your best customers, and are essential if you are to gain accurate insights into your audience. Naturally, every client is different, but the key here is to analyse the characteristics of your best customers and identify what they have in common. By gathering information such as age, sex, family status, job description and annual income, you can create a profile of your generic ideal client. 

Depending on the nature of your company, you are very likely to have more than one ideal customer: many marketing teams create around four or five of these personas.

Why are buyer personas so important?

In digital marketing, it’s essential to know who your ideal customer is in order to tailor the topics and style of your content to your target audience. 

It’s a similar concept to advertising: you obviously wouldn’t choose the same topics or write in the same tone of voice for content aimed at middle-aged CEOS as you would when addressing fashion conscious 18-34-year-olds. When you have created multiple client personas, you can then apply micro marketing techniques to customise your campaigns to your various ideal clients. 

Identifying and understanding your customer gives an advantage to any department that has direct customer contact, whether that is sales, customer support or advertising, allowing you to gain and retain customers more effectively. 

How do you create an effective buyer persona?

The best way to understand who your clients are is to go straight to the source - your clients themselves. Consider how you could reach out to them for interviews, asking for their opinions on how to improve your customer experience. Alternatively, check out your social media pages and see what information you can glean from them. 

Take at a look at reviews and opinions not only form happy but also from dissatisfied customers: discovering what challenges they found with your products not only gives you a clue about your client base but also gives you the opportunity to improve your product. 

Your sales force is also a great source of information: they contact your customers on a daily basis and can provide you with plenty of insights into their motivations and challenges. 

Failing all else, motivations for opinions can work. As an incentive, try offering a gift voucher or a discount for the time people spend on your questionnaire. 

What questions will help you to create buyer personas? 

The questions you ask your customers will fall not the following categories: 

• Personal backgrounds 
• Learning 
• Job/industry 
• Shopping preferences 

Demographic/personal backgrounds 

With this, we are putting a “face” to the customer. You’ll want to ask questions to help you paint a picture of these customers as actual people. Some questions you might ask: 

This topic helps you to visualise your customer, painting a picture of them as a real person. Questions might include: 

• Your age? 
• Your marital status? 
• Do you have any children and what are their ages? 
• What are your interests and hobbies? 
• What is your highest level of education? 

Learning 

With these questions, you will try to discover where these customers learn new things about their profession. By collating their replies, you’ll get a good of what topics might appeal to them. 
Some suggested questions are: 

• Where do you obtain new information about your industry and your role? 
• Are there any blogs that you follow? 

Industry/job questions 

Here, you’re attempting to discover information about their job, their company and their industry overall. Record quotations from your clients and use them in creating the persona. Some typical questions might be: 

• What industry do you work in? 
• What is your job/role title? 
• How is the success of your position measured? 
• What is your typical day like? 
• What tools help you to do your job? 
• How big is the company? 
• What are the greatest challenges for your company? 

Gather your information to create your marketing personas

Break down all this information into sections. It often helps to give your ideal customers a name and perhaps a photo to really bring them to life, helping you to think of this persona as a real client you can target when selling your product or service. 

This information should be readily available to all members of your team, so although it might seem superfluous, it’s worth printing out a chart with your customer personas and pinning it up where everyone can see it. 

At GrabSome, we have a wealth of professional expertise in identifying your ideal customers and can support you by tailoring your digital marketing strategy around them. To find out more about how we can help you grow your business or to receive a free, no-obligation consultation, please get in touch.