Bringing insights leaders together through creative, inspirational, educational, and thought-provoking content.

Defining Audience Personas: How to Understand your Target Market

分享这篇文章

Picture this: your SEO analysts and writers have crafted amazing content. The grammar is flawless, the topics are relevant, and high-quality photos break the monotony of the text. It would seem that these articles and web pages will bring in huge traffic and conversions once launched.

Days, weeks, even months pass by, but it’s not generating the results you hoped for. Your team scrambles to find out what’s wrong. However, nothing seems to be out of order; you seem to have done every due diligence involved in yourSEO services. Except you missed one crucial point: who exactly are you talking to?

The Buyer Persona

In this scenario, the main culprit is your买方角色. This is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. It’s a profile that contains characteristics of the people who are likely to transact with your brand.

If your content is geared towards the wrong buyer persona, your articles won’t be read, accepted, or appreciated by your target market. No matter how ingenious and well-written your content is, if it’s not of interest or value to your target reader, it won’t deliver any significant results for your company.

买方Persona对您的内容SEO策略的影响深远,从您的博客的雨伞主题到每篇文章中的微小语言差异。

Part 1: Importance of Buyer Persona in Shaping SEO Strategy

Think of the buyer persona as the first bricks you lay when building a wall. If they’re fragile or wobbly, the rest of the layers — the keywords, web copy, blog posts — will come tumbling down.

它是内容映射的基础

Content mapping refers to the process of planning content pieces that correspond to each stage of the买方的旅程— Awareness, Consideration, and Decision. Quick recap:

  • Awareness Stage —This is where the prospects have a problem but don’t know what it is. The goal of the content is to help them understand their problems and more importantly, nudge them to the next stage.
  • 考虑阶段— Here, the prospects seek solutions for the problem. The goal of the content is to educate them about the optimum solution and, similarly, nudge them to the next stage.
  • 决策阶段— The prospect is ready to commit to a solution, so the goal of the content is to present your brand as the vendor that can offer the optimum solution.

The content you produce should be carefully calibrated to facilitate a smooth conversion.

The buyer persona, therefore, plays a crucial role because writing for the wrong reader can be catastrophic.

For example, you want to target personas in the Awareness Stage, but you randomly wrote copy about cost-effective solutions. How can the reader appreciate the solutions you’ve laid out if they don’t even understand their problems in the first place?

It Determines the Language of Your Content

Rules of grammar may be universal, but local terminology spells the difference between engaging and alienating. Say your target is customers on the East Coast; a single word from the Midwest vernacular will turn your coastal readers off. This damages yourlocal SEO services.

The location alone dictates the differences in:

  • Dialect;
  • 句子的结构;
  • Colloquialism.

You also have fundamental persona differences that determine the terminologies in the content:

  • Fields of Expertise- 正确使用Jargon使得副本对一个专家的买方角色有价值。
  • Hobbies— Does the reader value the difference between a latte and a cappuccino? A half and full Windsor knot? Woods and iron golf clubs?
  • AgeCopy that targets Gen Z decision-makersrequires a solid grasp of the modern digital lingo.

总而言之,买方角色塑造您的内容,这反过来呼吁买家。您可以获得更多合格的领导和更好的转换机会。

It follows too, that building such a vital part of content strategy can’t be done overnight. It takes rigorous research and analysis to create an accurate and effective buyer persona.

第2部分:为您的品牌建立买方角色

A company can have several buyer personas, depending on the products or services offered, as well as the stage in the buyer’s journey. Here’s an example of how to craft a persona for B2B businesses.

Step 1: List the Details You Need

第一步是铺设综合买方角色所需的详细信息。

A. Demographics

Demographics are personal characteristics of your target buyers. It’s safe to say that demographics are more important in B2C profiles than B2Bs. After all, a B2B buyer isn’t making a personal decision — they’re making a choice on behalf of their organization.

Still, there are fundamental differences in the way different groups of people communicate. For instance, a 32-year-old start-up CEO vs. a 60-year-old seasoned counterpart would have different perspectives. So these pieces of information are still valuable:

  • Age
  • Gender
  • Address
  • Household income

B. Professional Role

The professional history of a B2B buyer largely determines the tone of the copy. The web content and articles must resonate with the persona’s:

  • Industry— Focus on the nature of the industry (fast-paced vs. relaxed; professional or whimsical, etc.), which impacts the decision of the buyer persona.
  • 工作Title— Take note of the persona’s job title, which dictates his or her role in the purchase process.
  • Company Size— Remember the size of the organization the persona is working for, since this determines the type of solutions they need.

C.目标和价值观

角色的更深层次的方面绘制了他或她的决策过程的图片。通过将内容与角色的目标和价值观调整,您更有可能攻击和弦并使读者转换成转换。

  • What values does the persona hold dear?
  • What personality traits (results-oriented, punctual, meticulous, etc.) can you incorporate in your copy?
  • What are the buyer persona’s professional goals? How will your copy help them achieve these goals?

d .痛点

Finally, determine the main pain points of your buyer persona. These lay at the heart of your web copy and blog articles — the pain points are the main motivations for transacting with your company.

  • Productivity— Is there something that prevents their organization from achieving maximum productivity?
  • Process— Are there issues that affect the optimum process flow within their company?
  • Financial —Is there a way to increase their bottom line without sacrificing the quality of their offers?

Step 2: Gather the Information

Once you have a blueprint of all the information you need, you need to fill in the blanks.

全面的买方角色不会从一个来源提取信息;需要多个引用来构建您所针对的人的完整图片。

Conduct a Survey among Existing Customers

您不必走得太远地提取所需的数据。向现有客户群发送在线问卷。为了提高您的回复率,对您的受访者提供小的激励。例如,回答调查的每个人都获得免费优惠券或小额折扣。

You can also analyze the information you’ve already captured from your existing customers to reveal trends, especially in demographics. Lead capture forms (web pages or dialog boxes that ask the visitor for information) can also generate data about your customers’ job titles, industry, and company size.

持有一对一的访谈或FGDS

One-on-one interviews or focus group discussions (FGD) require大量资源, but they also generate huge returns. Face-to-face interactions can reveal rich information about unique pain points and motivations for specific products or services.

Some questions you could explore are:

  • 组织问题使您寻找我们提供的解决方案?
  • What made you switch to us?
  • What difference did our solutions make for your company?
  • How did our solutions make you feel?

Another tip:avoid leading questions. These are questions that suggest an answer and consequently, skew the views of the interviewee. For example:

  • Were you relieved when you found our company?
  • 您与以前的供应商有多沮丧?

Collaborate with Your Sales Team

Your client-facing employees have a wealth of information to offer. Consult your sales team about frequently asked questions from customers. These shed light on the customers’:

  • Preferences;
  • 习惯;
  • Interests.

Similarly, you can also work with your employees who generate business data, like points of sale systems and website analytics, to further enrich your buyer persona.

Listen on Social Networking Platforms

If your customers spend a lot of time on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, then these social spaces are a goldmine of customer information.

与您的行业相关的目标条款和短语的关键以及您寻求解决的问题。调查人们如何谈论它们。更好,是积极主动的向他们询问他们的具体问题.

步骤3:构建买方的角色

Now that you’ve gathered hefty information about your buyer persona, it’s time to build a profile. Simple as it may sound, there’s still a systematic way to put together the results of your research.

  • Choose a Template for Your Profile.角色配置文件可以有无数的买家le online, which provide a ready-made, attractive file that you can easily cascade to your sales and digital marketing team.
  • Give Your Persona a Name.Make the name as real as possible to condition your teams that it’s a real person.
  • Sketch Out the Details.Group the following items together:

人口详细信息 -Lay out everything in a list-like manner, similar to a resume.

Professional Role —Paint a clear picture of the persona’s role in the company.

Goals and Motivations —写一个段落总结了如何让角人员对决定的影响。

Pain Points —Enumerate their main concerns and add a description.

Hobbies —Throw in a little more color to your persona by stating their hobbies.

  • Give the Persona a Photo.配置文件的最终触摸是照片,这使您的营销人员更容易加工量身定制的内容。

Incorporate Your Buyer Persona into Your Strategy

Once you’ve polished your buyer persona, you’re ready to incorporate it into your marketing efforts. With a clear picture of the person you’re talking to, your marketing team is better placed to create content that piques interests, solves problems, and converts readers into loyal customers.

分享这篇文章