When it comes to creating a mobile app, the goal is to create a product so great that it earns a top spot on the store charts. But how do you make sure that your product is doing what it needs to in order to satisfy your audience? And furthermore, how can you ensure that your digital marketing strategy properly highlights the reasons that your app is worth using?
If you’ve been wracking your brain, don’t worry. There is a secret weapon in the form of buyer personas! They can help you gain incredible insight into the viewpoint of your target audience, as well as helping you strategize marketing angles to effectively communicate with your audience. We’re breaking it all down step-by-step in this guide.
What Are Buyer Personas?
Before we dive deep into marketing strategies, how familiar are you with buyer personas? The first step in creating buyer personas is to define what they are. According to HubSpot, a buyer persona is defined as a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. In other words, a buyer persona is the prototype you can use as a company in order to cement your target audience and its different segments. This is the valuable information that will inform how your products/offerings evolve in development along with how you market them.
How to Create Buyer Personas
Now that you understand what buyer personas are and why they’re important to you as a business, the big question is – how do you actually go about creating one? The tricky thing about buyer personas is that there’s no one set list of them for you to choose from. But this is an opportunity for you as a company because it allows you to make each buyer persona unique and tailored exactly to your mission and how it aligns with your target demographic.
The first step in creating your buyer persona is to conduct market research. This can be done in the form of data insights, surveys, and even interviews. For example, you might go through your newsletter recipient or social media follower list to learn more about the types of people who are already engaging with your company. If you have an idea that’s brand new, you can look into the audiences of competitors in the niche to see where your product might fill in the gap. You can also gather qualifying information about people who sign up for email lists or freebies on your website in order to build your buyer personas.
Once you’ve conducted your research, it’s time to do the work of organizing your data and compiling similarities into prototypes. Some important things to consider are:
- Target age – what is the age or age range of your ideal customer? You can have different segments with different ranges, as long as you know that you’ll need to change tactics slightly to accommodate each.
- Job title – what type of career does your ideal buyer hold and where are they on that path? You will need to offer something different to an entry level employee versus a CEO.
- Location – is this person in a metropolitan area? Are they living in a small town? Do they need public transportation to get around, or do they drive everywhere?
- Hobbies – What do they do in their free time? What’s important to them outside of work?
These are just some of the factors that go into putting together your final buyer persona.Once you are able to identify what your target customer might look like, it’s time to tackle the most important aspect of marketing – targeting their needs
Using Buyer Personas to Address Pain Points
One of the most powerful aspects of creating buyer personas is the ability to use them to predict and circumvent customer pain points. What exactly are pain points? In short, they are a specific problem that potential or current customers are experiencing in the marketplace, any hindrance they might run up against during their customer journey (commbox.io).
Pain points vary widely, but establishing a strong buyer persona (or a few) can help you key in on a specific set you’re likely to see in order to plan how you can address them proactively. According to Selling Revolution, there are four general categories of customer pain points:
- Financial
- Productivity
- Process
- Support
If you have a buyer persona whose attributes include being a student between the ages of 18-24, you might solve a financial pain point by offering a student discount or a payment plan. If your buyer persona is a working mom of two between the ages of 29-35, you might solve a productivity pain point by marketing your family meal kit service to them as a huge time saver for feeding their family healthily and efficiently. As you can see, doing a target market analysis that helps you identify more specific needs allows you to then target marketing strategies more effectively to create worthwhile results.
Real-Life Examples
We’ve talked a lot about how buyer personas and pain points can come together to create a killer campaign, but what does this look like in real life? Let’s take a look at some companies that are making use of this right now.
Monday.com
Source: TheDrum
Possible Pain Point: Productivity
Possible Buyer Persona: man or woman in their late 20’s-early 30’s working in management for a company with a remote or hybrid model. They value efficiency and might enjoy HIIT workouts and ordering groceries in order to optimize their schedule.
Allstate
Possible Pain Point: Financial
Possible Buyer Persona: Car owners with a teenage daughter living in the suburbs and making a comfortable enough living to provide their child with a car or allow her to use their’s regularly. This ad turns the buyer persona on its head by portraying a character who appears to be the buyer, but is actually an example of a pain point for the true buyer!
Conclusion
Whether you’re working on an eCommerce app or a new social media app, buyer personas are an invaluable tool to harness as a digital marketer. When you take the time to begin your campaign strategy with the identification of specific segments of your audience, you’ll realize how much easier it is to come up with innovative and distinct answers to issues in the market with your product and the way that you advertise it.