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Digivate’s Guide to Developing Buyer Personas That are Actually Useful

Do you feel like your marketing efforts are falling on deaf ears?

And no matter how hard you try, nobody is responding to your top-notch ad copy or content.

The majority of marketers are shooting in the dark without having any understanding of what or why are they doing it.

We live in an ad-heavy world. If your business wants to break through the clutter and capture a prospective buyer’s attention, you can’t afford to use vague and general messaging in the hope of connecting with at least a few recipients.

You will simply run out of money doing it.

In an age of information overload, being accurate – not assumptive – is the key to success.

The more specific and detail-oriented you are, the easier it is to break through the clutter of information and actually get people’s attention.

In other words, personalised marketing is the key to your marketing success. And buyer personas lie at the heart of any personalised marketing strategy.

What Are Buyer Personas?

At the most basic level, a buyer persona is a detailed description of your target customer.

But here’s the thing:

Your business probably attracts more than one “type” of people and these different groups of people probably buy your products for different reasons.

Once you know what makes these different people buy from you, you can create better sales pages, better blog posts, better email, and ad campaigns.

And in turn, enjoy much higher conversion rates.

The buyer personas we develop at Digivate are more than a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer.

They are the foundation for a higher ROI.

How We Create Buyer Personas at Digivate

Our approach to personas is different from other agencies [and we think it’s much better, too].

We built the unique persona-first MIND approach for 2 reasons:

1. The customer research process is flawed

Traditional marketing research relies heavily on the consumer self-reporting what they think, feel and believe. 

The problem with this approach is that humans are contradictory creatures who say one thing but do the opposite. This is why marketers can’t blindly rely on consumer surveys or focus groups to understand their target audiences.

 2. Agencies don’t know how to create effective personas

The majority of agencies treat personas like a box-ticking exercise and build “set it and forget it” assets that are never actually used effectively in their marketing activities. 

We do better.

Our approach has helped our clients to target 10,000 users with personalised messages and convert them into loyal advocates of their brand.

Help me with buyer personas

We use digital personas for two reasons:

  1. To identify where your audiences are active online (so that you can finetune and scale your targeting)
  2. To sculpt the messaging that best speaks to their needs and motivations (so that you can ignite the feeling of ‘Wow, this brand really understands me, I can trust it’ in your target audience)

Think of it like reflecting your customers’ minds and hearts right back at them. Our mirroring-approach grabs your customer’s attention leading to more conversions and sales.

The problem with generalised one-size-fits-all marketing is that you can’t make a second first impression:

If you can’t engage your potential customers in a relevant and contextual manner, you will lose their trust and interest. And once you have lost someone’s interest, it’s hard to get that back.

Let’s look at exactly how our MIND personas are different and what is the benefit for you …

#1 MIND Personas Are Real People

The digital personas we build are not hypothetical or fictional characters, they are real people, rooted in real data.

Instead of only asking your prospects a set of questions, we also look at their behaviour online.

We usually start with profiling people who have bought from you in the past. By looking at your website analytics, we can see the nature of the queries coming into your site, who visits your site, when do they visit and what are their interests and affinities.

Why do you need this information?

The more data you can collect about your audience to find consistencies and patterns – the easier it will be to construct your real personas and integrate them into your marketing.

[Unfortunately, many clients come to us with an idea of their perfect target audience, which actually turns out not to be the case.]

#2 MIND Personas Are Built for the Age of Rapid Change

Your customers’ buying habits are changing all the time.

Businesses often find that their main persona is overtaken by an unexpected buyer group, in which case a reallocation of resources may be required.

We can help you to establish the systems and processes needed to form a constantly updated picture of your buyers.

Help me with buyer personas

Below is a 3-part roadmap to show how we gather information of your buyers to guide your marketing efforts:

buyer personas

#3 MIND Personas Are Incredibly Scalable

Unlike other agencies, we don’t create “set it and forget it” assets. We want your personas to guide your marketing, not just lie aimlessly on your computer drive.

By continually analysing the behaviours and patterns amongst your target audience, we gather more data and learn more about your audience.

As we learn about each persona group, we iterate the persona into further versions of the persona.

The diagram below shows how the workflow is rolled out.

MIND buyer personas not only allow you to personalise your marketing at scale but also meet your customers’ needs across all digital touchpoints.

For example, if Persona A2 converts best on Facebook, you can scale that ad campaign and increase your revenue massively.

Why Are Buyer Personas So Important for Your Business?

Buyer personas allow you to take the guesswork out of your marketing, so you can stop wasting money.

Personas inform you of what your business should be doing to help potential customers in their buying journey so you can grow your business.

By understanding your customers better, you can create marketing and sales strategies built around your customers’ objectives, day-to-day challenges and ‘pain points’ rather than doing what you think is best and hoping it will work.

Nick
Article by

Nicholas Turner

For over 12 years, Nick has been conjuring creative experiences that entertain and - most importantly - resonate with users. He holds a Film and Television Production bachelor's degree from the Cambridge School of Art as well as a degree from the University of the Arts London for Brand Strategy. Whenever he's not willing creative ideas into existence, Nick spends his time travelling, consuming comics and movies as well as writing his own scripts, short stories and novels.
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How can we help?

We can implement the right technology and analytics for your business, set up tracking tags across all online activity and create a content strategy for all customer touchpoints that drive the prospects towards the final conversion.

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