What Are Buyer Personas and Why Do I Need Them?

Total Read Time: 5 Minutes

Helping Your SEO With Strategic Messaging

Creating A Deeper Understanding of your Customers

Developing a deeper understanding of your customer is so important today in a world flooded with constant selling; billboards, TV, web and radio advertisements, even in your social media feeds.

Customers have become less loyal and trusting to brands and businesses.

Companies that are winning at gaining their customers trust have developed a better understanding of who their customer is by standing in their shoes. By doing this, you are experiencing their frustrations and have a clearer vision on the content, products, or services they need to solve their problem.

Let’s dive into the buyer persona, and how buyer personas help SEO.

What Are Buyer Personas?

Buyer personas are used in marketing to collect information about your target audience- their favorite brand, where they shop online, what magazines/publications they read, and more. Often times in content marketing, the content will fail because it was not targeted to anyone specifically.

If you do not target a specific audience, you are targeting nobody.

Not to be confused with demographics, buyer personas are more about the buying habits and lifestyle preferences. If you said that your customer demographic is female, age 30-45, with a salary of $75,000, but what does this really reveal to us?

We have no idea if she if married; if she has children. A single female with no children is likely shopping and getting her products from places much differently than the married, mother of two. But this information can be interpreted in many different ways, which is why creating specific profiles is so important.

Your business can have two or three personas, or as many as 10-20! It’s important to start small. Overtime you can develop these further and get more strategic.

Why Do I Need Them?

Examples of Buyer Personas

Let’s take a look at a buyer persona example. Here you can see we want to find the who, what, why, and how.

Who?

Let’s meet Paula. She is a business owner looking for information about how she can bring her flower shop business online, and get more online customers to inquire about her bouquets. We can learn about her family and job background; demographics like age, gender and income; and personality identifiers like her personality type, whether she prefers digital communication like emails or phone calls, etc.

This information can be gathered from surveys or forms to customers and prospects, reviewing website analytics, and more.

At LocalWork Marketing, I’ll be using your Google Analytics information to capture as much details as possible, but it will be important to get your help in this aspect. You may not know these specific details, but share as much as you know and it will be a great starting point.

What?

What problem is keeping Paula up at night? Business during holiday times are great, but during the non-holiday seasons within the year, her business declines. Her challenges are how to reach her customer and let them know about the affordable bouquets offered year round.

Why?

Included are some quotes from Paula about why offering information about her flower shop online would be helpful for attracting new customers. This information is useful when Paula gets to the sales process. The sales team will be able to use these quotes to address her concerns about the business and overcome her objections.

How?

How should you craft your messaging to offer Paula the best solution? One of her challenges were, “finding new clients that enjoy fresh floral arrangements year round.”

Creating Content Schedules, and Why It’s So Effective

Now that we have a great deal of information about Paula’s personality, business, frustrations, and goals, we can be strategic about what information we are utilizing on the blog or website to attract her attention.

It’s time to personalize the messaging. Instead of including Paula in the monthly newsletter for SEO clients, it would be much better for her to sign up for a newsletter that gives her information about what SEO is and how it can help her business grow online. This enhances the customer experience so you can better serve her.

She may begin with a blog about the basics of SEO, but what if she wants to learn more? I can anticipate that she will want to learn more about different aspects of the SEO process so it’s important to offer more content still speaking directly to her concerns.

Throughout this content, I am offering her knowledge and resources to learn more about SEO and whether it might be a good fit. If she decides it would benefit her business, she will most likely choose the company that gave her educational content to help her make her own decision rather than a blog post that only sold her on services.

The Buyer Lifecycle

To take content mapping a step further, you can combine the buyer persona information with the content map to determine where the person fits in the buying cycle. This allows you even more control over the messaging you are sending.

Maybe Paula has been returning to the website for over a month now, consuming different articles and opening the newsletter with new blogs. Now we can see that she is invested in our company’s resources.

It may be time to send her an occasional newsletter about free audits or marketing specials, or create stronger calls to action within the blogs that entice her to speak with someone on the team.

Action Plan- Creating Your Personas

It’s time to gather more information about your customers. Use this buyer persona template to get started.

The good news is, as your SEO team, we will do most of the leg work for you! You may not know specifics about this customer and where they like to shop, or what device they are using online but you do know their common frustrations, and why they might be seeking your services.

Please provide details about three customers. This can be customers you already have, or customers you are hoping to get more business from.

Once we get back this information, the team at LocalWork Marketing will develop your customer profiles further, and create a custom content strategy that is more detailed and strategic so you can convert more website visitors into business!