When you have work that needs to get done ASAP, it is easy to push a seemingly less important task – like creating buyer personas – to the back burner. After all, you have work to do. You need to make sure blogs are published, social media posts are up, ads are running and performing like they should, and that all your long form content is up to snuff. It is easy to get consumed by day to day tasks, and forget about buyer personas. But when you put off creating buyer personas, you are actually limiting yourself, as well as the content and ads you create.
So what is a buyer persona?
A persona is essentially a made up person you create based on information you’ve gathered about the type of person you are targeting. You compile research about their job, their responsibilities, their goals, their challenges, and their overall demographics. You might even create a short narrative and a name to make your persona more real to you. Your goal is to create representative person that you can use as a standard for your content. You can hold up an idea or piece of content to the persona and ask yourself “Would Sally Salesman find this piece of content useful or entertaining? Is this something that she would read?”
Now you might be thinking, “I know who my target audience is. Why should I take the time to build a buyer persona?” While you might have a pretty solid idea of who your target audience is, do you really know that much about them? Do you know their job responsibilities? Who they report to? Their job goals and and the challenges they face? If the most you about your buyers is their job title, how can you possibly create content that will matter to them?
A buyer persona will really help you get to know your potential customers.
You’ll know what their pain points are and how you can address them. You’ll know their goals for their job and how you can help them achieve those goals. You’ll know what kinds of questions they are asking, and then be able to provide them with answers. If buyer personas help you create content directed toward your ideal customer, can you really afford to not take the time to create them?
Do you use buyer personas? Let us know in the comments below!
Much success,
Looking for more great reads? Check out these related articles:
- Giving Your Buyer Persona a Personality
- Getting Inside Their Heads Part 1: What is a Buyer Persona Anyway?
- Getting Inside Their Heads Part 2: The Science of Creating a Buyer Persona
- Getting Inside Their Heads Part 3: Using Buyer Personas & Customer Journey Mapping to
- Getting Inside Their Heads Part 4: Mind the Gaps, Filling Holes in Your Client’s Content Strategy
- Learn About Your Customers
- 4 Misconceptions About Customer Journey Mapping
