Uncovering buyer personas for hyper-targeted marketing
Buyer Personas are a best practice tool for marketers that comprise types of ideal customers. Personas are not profiles of simple demographic information like sex, age, income, ethnicity and marital status. These descriptions dig deeper to capture psychographic information like needs, goals, challenges, perceptions and motivations for a particular type of buyer in the market for product.
Why we buy what we buy
Social and psychological factors come into play when
people buy products. What and why we buy has more to do with our emotional
wants, than our rational needs. Take dining out for example. Dining out is so
much more than the food. We dine out for human connection, the expertise of
being tended to, the theatre of food presentation and participating in a shared
social ritual of food-making and meal presentation.
The needs and wants around food are primal, ancient, cultural, develop and alter. Sometimes change is triggered quite quickly through trends or imperatives for example COVID. A culture focused on convenience, independence combined with recent isolation imposed by COVID, has taken its toll on personal interaction and connection. Human connection is important to health. Engaging having a restaurant team or simply spending some time in a restaurant or café refreshes and sustains us. A beautifully prepared and presented meal is an expression of love and is not lost on today's discerning and more informed buyer.
Pinpoint your target
Uncovering buyer personas help you market with pinpoint accuracy. Digging into buyer personas allows you to uncover what people like about your product and what their priorities were once they chose to buy from you – important to know at any time, but especially so if you are attempting to re-ignite interest in your product or are in a highly competitive environment.
Buyer personas help your employees develop a strong understanding of who your customers really are and why they do and choose what they do. It also helps staff when suggestive, up and cross-selling on the floor. Identifying and defining buyer personas helps you better express your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) in most that you do and what marketing materials and channels you choose. Understanding buyer personas help tailor what, tone, stories, pictures and videos to use in your marketing. Done correctly, your potential customers will feel like you are speaking to them directly, using their language and addressing their unique needs and concerns.
Gather the data
Start together with your ideal buyers. Review any past customer research you might have conducted. Ask sales or floor staff about current regular buyers' characteristics. Pinpointing the personas that generally go to your competitors' venue can tell you more about those that visit yours. Analytics data on visitors to your website will tell you the average chronilogical age of site visitor, male or female. For every persona type, observe and document: frequency of visits, time they buy and spending habits. What that individual values about your business may be apparent from their comments within their online review. Equally your comments ought to in poor rating reviews are what they don't value about your business. Group buyers together to create a persona that represents that type.
You may also undertake an interview with some of your regular customers, but offer them an incentive to do so. You can offer a gift cards for those on your email list that complete an emailed survey. Persona interviews and surveys require unearthing the individual's unstated goals and talking candidly and personally regarding their lives. It takes time for the trust required to develop, so your research survey must be carefully-designed, timed and customers carefully chosen. You should enrich and refine your personas regularly, as buyer preferences, attitudes and trends never stand still.
