Buyer Personas are Essential for Any Business

If you’ve read anything about marketing then you’ve probably heard about buyer personas. They’re an essential part of any marketing strategy, especially if you’re trying to sell products online. But, what is a buyer persona?

Creating a buyer persona will help your print-on-demand business by narrowing your focus on what designs to create, how to market to your audience, and showing what you should avoid doing.

What is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a made-up person that represents your ideal customer. You create this persona using a variety of data.

Depending on the size of your business, you may have more than one buyer persona.

Different Types of Personas

There are other types of buyer personas you can create, though depending on the size of your business you may not have to create one.

Negative Personas

While the typical buyer persona is your ideal customer, a negative persona is the total opposite.

A negative buyer persona is someone that you don’t want to spend time and money on. While it may seem like a bad idea to cut off any potential revenue, it’s important to know that you can’t sell to everyone.

By knowing who you don’t want to sell to, you can save yourself time, money, and energy.

Micro Persona

While most personas are very detailed, micro personas are not. It focuses on a specific set of information within a persona. You can focus on the persona’s job and how that affects their life, where they live and how that limits their options, or just the different aspects of their personality.

This is a good option if you’re a large business and have to make multiple personas, but don’t have the time to make typical personas.

What Information Do You Need to Make a Buyer Persona?

Gathering the right information will make creating a buyer persona a breeze. You’ll get this data through observation, analytics, and some guesswork.

While some of this data may not seem relevant to your business, the idea is to create a person that feels real. So while it may not be immediately relevant, it’s still important.

Personal Info

When we say personal info, we don’t mean that you should go snooping through their diary. We mean you should gather information about them as a person.

What Do They Want From You?

Why are they buying from your store specifically? What makes you different from the thousands of other stores online?

While this section of information seems more about you, it’s still about your buyer persona.

• What is their favorite product?
• Why do they buy from you?
• What problems are you solving?
• How did they find you?
• Are they the ones buying from you?
• What is their budget?

Why is a Buyer Persona Important?

Buyer personas are so helpful when running your own business. They help narrow down the focus of what you should do with marketing, what products you should sell, and how to reach out and earn more customers.

Marketing

Marketing is a wide field of ideas and actions, and having any sort of direction is always helpful. Buyer personas will help you identify what kind of marketing works best for your audience.

Let’s say you create a buyer persona named Artsy Aaron, and he prefers marketing that’s image-heavy versus getting a lot of emails with text. This helps you narrow down how to communicate with your audience instead of having to test different ideas on how to market it to them.

Products

Let’s say you create a buyer persona called Environmental Emily and she doesn’t like what fast fashion does to the environment. Because you know she is eco-conscious, you focus more on reusable products instead of apparel.

The customers that represent this persona will then make more purchases with you, earning you more money. You also save time and money by not having to try different products to see what sticks.

Get New Customers

With a well-built persona, you’ll be able to target new people and bring them into your customer base. You’ll know what kind of ads to use, what social media platforms to post on, and what products will capture people’s attention.

Better Help Customers

Buyer personas help you figure out what your customers need from you. By knowing common pain points your buyer persona experiences, you or your team will be better prepared to handle any issues customers contact you about.

Great customer service is how you keep customers coming back for more.

Do You Need to Make a Buyer Persona?

Yes. No matter how small your business is, it’s always good to create a buyer persona. Depending on the size of your store, your persona may not be very big, but it’s a great start!

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