You may have an imaginary friend as a child. Social media marketers have it too – just in case buyer personalities or audience personalities.
But unlike your imaginary friend, these imaginary characters aren’t just there to scare your parents. They are incredibly helpful tools for targeting your ideal customer.
As a social marketer or any marketer, it’s easy to get lost in the details of keeping track of your latest engagement rates and marketing campaigns. Buyer personalities remind you to put your audience’s wants and needs before yourself and help you create content to better target your ideal customer.
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a detailed description of someone who represents your target audience. This person is fictional, but based on deep research of your current or desired audience.
You may also hear it called a customer personality, audience personality, or marketing personality.
You cannot get to know each customer or potential customer individually. But you can create a customer persona to represent your customer base. (However, you may need to create more than one buyer persona, as different types of customers may buy your products for different reasons.)
You will give this recipient a name, demographic details, interests, and behavioral characteristics. You will understand their goals, pain points, and buying patterns. You can even give them a face using stock photography or illustration if you want – perhaps because it’s important for your team to put a face to a name.
Basically, you want to think about and talk about this model client. as if he were a real person. This allows you to create marketing messages especially for them.
Protecting the buyer persona (or personality)s) keeps the voice and direction of everything consistent in mind, from product development to your brand voice to the social channels you use.
Why should you use a buyer or audience persona?
Buyer staffing allows you to focus on customer priorities rather than your own.
Think of your buyer personas every time you make a decision about your social marketing strategy (or overall marketing strategy).
Does a new campaign address the needs and goals of at least one of your buyer personalities? If not, you have good reason to reconsider your plan, however exciting it may be.
After you define your buyer personas, you can create organic posts and social ads that directly appeal to the target customers you define. Social advertising, in particular, offers incredibly detailed social targeting options that can get your ad in front of exactly the right people.
Build your social strategy based on helping your people achieve their goals and you will form a bond with the real customers they represent. It’s all about building brand loyalty and trust to ultimately streamline your sales process.
How to build a buyer persona step by step?
Your buyer persona shouldn’t just be someone you want to hang out with: it should be based on real-world data and strategic goals. Here’s how to create a fictional customer that fits perfectly with your real-world brand.
1. Do a thorough audience research
It’s time to dig deep. Who are your current customers? Who is your social audience? Who are your competitors targeting? For a more in-depth look at these concepts, check out our audience research guide, but in the meantime…
Compile audience data from your social media analytics (especially Facebook Audience Insights), your customer database, and Google Analytics to narrow down details such as:
- Age
- Location
- Slice
- Spending power and patterns
- areas of interest
- Difficulties
- life stage
- For B2B: The size of the business and who makes the purchasing decisions
It’s also a good idea to make sure you understand. social channels your audience uses. Find out where they’re spending their time online using tools like Moyens I/O Insights Powered by Brandwatch, Keyhole.co, and Google Analytics.
You can also exclude Who are the competitors targeting? Using tools like Buzzsumo and Moyens I/O’s search streams.
For more in-depth strategies, check out our full article on how to conduct competitor research using social tools.
2. Identify customer goals and pain points
Your target audience’s goals can be personal or professional, depending on the types of products and services you sell. What motivates your customers? What is their last game?
On the other side of that are their pain points. What problems or challenges are your potential customers trying to solve? What is keeping them from success? What obstacles do they face in reaching their goals?
Your sales team and customer support department are great ways to find answers to these questions, but another important option is to engage in social listening and social media sentiment analysis.
Setting up search streams to monitor who’s talking about your brand, products, and competitors gives you a real-time insight into what people are saying about you online. You can find out why they like your products or what parts of the customer experience aren’t working.
3. Understand how you can help
Now that you understand your customers’ goals and struggles, it’s time to consider how you can help. It just means thinking beyond features and analyze the truth benefits your product or service
A feature is what your product is or does. Advantage is how your product or service makes or improves your customer’s life.
Consider your audience’s main buying barriers and where your followers are on their buying journey? And then ask yourself: How can we help? Capture the answer in a clear sentence.
4. Create your buyer contacts
Gather all your research and start looking for common features. As you group these traits together, you’ll have the foundation of your unique customer personalities.
Give your buyer persona a name, a job title, a home, and other identifying attributes. You want your personality to look like a real person.
For example, let’s say you identify the main clientele as women who are 40 years old, professionally successful, live in the city, have no children, and have a passion for great restaurants. Your buyer persona could be “High Achiever Haley.”
- 41 years old.
- He goes to the spin class three times a week.
- He lives in Toronto and is the founder of his own PR firm.
- He has a Tesla.
- He and his wife take international vacations twice a year and prefer to stay in boutique hotels.
- He is a member of a wine club.
You get the gist: it’s not just a list of features. This is a detailed, specific description of a potential customer. It makes you think humanely about your future buyer so they’re not just a collection of data points. These things may not necessarily be true for every buyer in your audience, but they do help to represent an archetype in a tangible way.
Aim for the amount of information you’d expect to see on a dating site (though don’t forget to include the pain points… which don’t necessarily fly on Bumble).
As you review your client personalities, be sure to describe who each person is now and who they want to be. This allows you to start thinking about how your products and services can help them reach this place of ambition.
Buyer contact examples
Brands can build and share their buyer personas with the team in a variety of ways. It can be a list of bullet points; It can be a solid, multi-paragraph story. It can contain a stock photo or illustration. There’s no wrong way to format these reference documents: do it in a way that helps your team best understand your customers (and target people).
A Beauty-Aware, Magazine-loving Mother Named Karla
Here is an example from UX designer James Donovan. For a fictional client named Karla Kruger, her job reveals a buyer persona, including details about her age, demographics, and of course, her pain points and goals. She’s 41 and pregnant and we have lively details on her product choices and beauty routine.
The interesting thing about this example is that it also includes media consumption and favorite brands. Details are key to bringing a client personality to life, so be specific!
Here we also see that “Karla” falls into various spectrums of brand loyalty, social impact and price sensitivity. If such details about your client are important, look for this information during the research phase and include it in your personal template!
A Brand Loyal Suburban Home Cook
This example of a buyer persona from Survey Monkey brings a fictional data analyst to life. We learn about her education and where she lives, but also about her interests and passions – she loves cooking and traveling, values her relationships and is loyal to the brand.
If this were your company’s prototype customer, how would that affect your marketing strategy or product offerings? Having a clearly defined buyer persona helps you frame every decision you make.
Young Professional Who Loves Dog
We learn about Tommy Technology’s income and love life and career struggles for this buyer persona created by digital marketing agency Single Grain. Adding some quotes (taken from real customers or invented) can help give such a character a voice as well.
Buyer contact template
Ready to start building your first buyer persona? Our free buyer persona template on Google Docs is a great place to start:
To use the template, click the “File” tab and select “Create a copy” from the drop-down menu. You now have your own version, which you must fill out as you see fit.
Think of your buyer personas every time you make a decision about your social media content and overall marketing strategy. When you apply these people the right way, you’ll connect with the real customers they represent and increase sales and brand loyalty.
Save time on social media with Moyens I/O. From a single dashboard, you can manage all your accounts, engage with audiences, measure results, and more. Try it for free today.
