If you’re brand new to content marketing, or you’ve heard about buyer personas but you don’t know what they are, this guide is for you. We’ll cover everything you need to know as a beginner interested in creating buyer personas for your company.

What is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a (researched) representation of your customers. One of the best ways to build a relationship with your customers and increase marketing ROI is to get serious about who they actually are.

For content marketing, personas help you deliver the content that’s most relevant and useful for your audience. That’s because you’re creating it specifically for them- based on what they do for a living, their main challenges, and their goals.

Why do you Need a Buyer Persona?

Consider how you talk to your friends and family members. If you were writing a quick email or text to your friend, it would probably contain different language compared to if you were writing it to your mum. And it would probably change again if you were writing to your 87-year old grandma, or 14-year-old son.

Once you’ve developed a buyer persona, you’ll know the type of language you should be using (based on their age and demographics) what they’re interested in, and the types of content that will meet their needs.

Researching your Buyer Personas

When you’re ready to begin creating buyer personas, the first step is research. Luckily, you’ll already have a lot of data about your customers. You just need to analyse this data and pull out the most important information for your needs.

Here are a few places you can find this information:

Social Media
Your business should have LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook at the very least. Many businesses also use Instagram and Snapchat to connect with their customers.

By looking at your social media data, you can see what your followers are talking about and how they’re interacting online.

You can see what your followers are interested in by looking at your Twitter analytics (under the ‘Audience’ tab). Tools like Followerwonk will also analyse your followers to show you where they’re located, the times they’re tweeting from, and more.

Google Analytics
If you haven’t yet connected your website to Google Analytics, now is the time to do so. Google Analytics is one of the best ways to get demographic information about the people visiting your website.

This includes their age, gender, location, interests, and more. You’ll also be able to see what these people are doing on your website, and which pages they’re exiting on.

Market Research
Market research gives you more information about the problems your customers are hoping to get solved. You can get a much better understanding of who your customers are by carrying out polls, surveys, interviews, and more.

Tools like SurveyMonkey are helpful, and you can also create polls and surveys through your social media accounts.

However, conducting interviews with your customers is arguably the best way to get up-to-date, insightful information about them. This allows you to ask follow-up questions and really dig deeper into what your customers want and what they’re struggling with each day.

‍Putting it All Together

Now that you’ve done your research, it’s time to use all of that information to develop a buyer persona.

Luckily, there are a number of awesome buyer persona templates that you can use to enter in your information.

Here are some of the things you should include:

• A name for your persona
• A photo (choose a stock photo of someone who represents what your persona may look like)
• Age
• Location
• Job title
• Marital status
• Interests
• Goals and challenges
• Salary (or combined household income)
• Level of education
• How you can help them solve their problems
• Elevator pitch

As you can see, a lot of work goes into creating buyer personas. But the end result is worth it, with higher conversion rates and a better relationship with your customers.

If you need help with your content marketing, get in touch today.