A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. When creating your buyer persona(s), consider including customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. The more detailed you are, the better.
In small business marketing, creating a customer persona is an essential step toward knowing the specific traits of the people you are marketing to. Your target audience consists of living, breathing people. It’s your job to determine who they are. Creating a persona gives you the information needed to focus your content marketing efforts and SEO strategies on a person who represents the ideal traits of the members of your audience.
Ask yourself these questions
Do you know what your audience values in a brand? Do you know what kind of communication they prefer? When you create a customer persona, you get to know who your audience is and what drives them, which is key to marketing strategies and success.
Creating a Customer Persona
Your customer persona is an imagined person who stands for your ideal buyer or customer. Creating this semi-fictional representative of your audience can be done using several different methods or analyzing and researching actual customers:
* Surveys
* Social media interaction
* Reader comments, reviews, and engagement
The information you are trying to gather includes getting to know the goals and motivation of your audience, their pain points, and what keeps them up at night. These factors influencing motivation are demographics, economic situation, group influences, and personal preferences.
When you know what drives your audience, your SEO, content marketing, and even small business podcasts can acknowledge the pain points of your audience and show your ability to resolve their challenges.
Why a Customer Persona is an Important Small Business Marketing Strategy
A customer persona is a key part of a successful small business marketing strategy. If you don’t explicitly define who your customer is, then you will end up marketing to everyone; a tactic that dilutes your effectiveness and makes it unlikely that you will stand out in a crowd.
Once you have a distinct, detailed picture of your customer, every aspect of your small business marketing can be geared toward their interests, needs, and wants. Every action you take from your content marketing to the graphics of your website to the topics covered in your business podcast can be created with a specific person in mind and will ultimately be precisely what this particular group of people has been looking for.
Do you need expert guidance in creating a customer persona, or with any other aspect of your content marketing such as small business podcasts or SEO? FireRock Marketing specializes in helping businesses build content strategies that deliver leads. Schedule a consult today.
