Identifying the right audience and creating buyer persona

Knowing your target audience in detail leads to success of digital marketing campaigns. Learn how to identify your target audience and build buyer personas.

Half the marketers⁽¹⁾ feel that it has become increasingly difficult to capture their audience’s attention. But it isn’t that difficult when you know your audience inside and out.

In this blog, you will learn why it is important to identify your target audience, how you can identify your target audience, and how to build a buyer persona from it.

Why is it important to identify and document your target audience? 

Learning about the people for whom you are creating content and messaging helps you:

• Be relevant in your messaging –

  Knowing about the likes, dislikes, habits, and challenges of your audience helps you create messaging that they can relate to.

• Address their implicit and explicit need –

  Once you know what problems they are trying to address, you can deliver solutions that meet their needs.

• Create content that drives action –

  Prospects will act if the content is personalized, relevant, memorable, and valuable.

• Deliver information to them when they need it and where they need it –

  Once you know what platforms they use for seeking information, you can place your content strategically there at a time when they are most receptive.

• Efficiently utilize the budget –

  If you are targeting people who are not your audience, you are simply wasting your resources. Targeted communication means better ROI.

How to identify target audience for B2B digital marketing

While identifying the audience, try to gather as much information as possible about your prospects. This includes the following information:

• Demographic information –

  Age, gender, marital status, location, socio-economic status, education, and professional role are some of the important factors.
  

• Interest –

  Knowing about the interests, hobbies, likes, and dislikes of the audience will help to create content that they can relate to.

• Internet usage  –

  Identifying their internet usage patterns, the platforms they use, which time of the day they are most active there, time spent on various media channels, websites visited, devices used, etc. can give a deep understanding of the audience and deliver a better customer experience.

• Challenges and motivation –

  It is very important to know what challenges your audience is facing, because only then can you come up with a solution that will attract their attention. Once you know what motivates them and what their desires are, you can create tailored content.

• Stage of the customer journey –

  Again, a very important factor to know about. Depending on whether they are in the awareness, consideration, or decision stage, you can use appropriate content types and content distribution channels to talk about your solutions. Read our blog on choosing content distribution channels as per the stage of the buyer’s journey.

 All the above factors will help you define your audience in general, but you can go a step further and create buyer personas to get a more visual representation of the target audience.

What is a buyer persona?

A buyer person is a representation of a typical customer who invests in your products and services. You can even give a name to the persona. A buyer persona covers every single aspect of the customer – demographic information, interests, professional role, motivation, problems faced, decision-making power, stage of buyer journey etc.

By creating personalized content⁽²⁾ as per personas, you can make your website 2–5 times more effective and increase email CTR by 14% and conversion rate by 10%.

Businesses can have more than one buyer persona. For example, for a manufacturing company, different personas can include operators, engineers, operation managers, plant managers etc.

Take a look at a sample buyer persona.

How to create a buyer persona for your business 

To create a buyer persona, you need to dig deep and find out more about your existing customers. Think of the things that they share in common, and which contributes to a decision in favor of your business.

Here are the steps to creating and putting a buyer persona to use.

• Gather relevant information about existing customers –

  This includes demographic and geographic information, professional roles, experience level, education, and so on.

• Learn about their motivations and factors that drive decisions  –

  Interview your customers and find out what motivates them towards finding solutions; what their goals are; what they like about your products and services; their role in the decision-making process; and so on.

• Create persona –

  Using the above information, you can create specific personas. To help you achieve that, we have put together a buyer persona template.

  

• Share buyer personas with the sales team  –

  It is quite important to share these personas with the sales team so that when they are in talks with these prospects, they know how best to close the deal.

This buyer persona is useful in creating tailored content for the audience.

To make sure that you spend your resources only on those who are most likely to buy your products, knowledge of your audience is critical.

How Ethosh can help your business transform customer experiences?

Ethosh has helped many start-ups and Fortune 100 brands experience the digital revolution. Partner with Ethosh to develop a 360-degree digital marketing solution tailored to meet your needs. From creating compelling content for your audiences to planning and executing winning campaigns, Ethosh can bring together a program that will build customer confidence and trust at every stage of the buyer's journey and quickly turn new customers into brand advocates.

Reference and Citation-

1. https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/B2B_2022_Research.pdf 

2. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/build-buyer-personas?__hstc=151869350.42c774ecf77b434f030ea309d2b03dce.1659492496791.1659492496791.1659492496791.1&__hssc=151869350.1.1659492496792&__hsfp=1244467968