When you are building ads, the first question you should ask yourself is: for who am I creating these?
You want your message to be seen by users who will most likely convert and buy your product or service. After all, you wouldn’t sell baby diapers to 15-year-olds, probably because they think more about sneakers than having a baby. However, researching the average age women give birth in a country can help you understand which demographic you should advertise your baby products to.
This is why it is crucial to create a buyer persona
A buyer persona is not your customer’s profile or an ideal image of your perfect client.
A buyer persona is a fictional identity that integrates some of your potential customer’s characteristics. These elements should be sourced from actual clients, and you can think about their shopping behaviours, as well as their interests, likes, and dislikes.
Defining a buyer persona makes you put the client first and create ads with the audience’s needs in mind. Your business will greatly benefit from this exercise because you will create better content and attract their attention by knowing how your target audience behaves.
How to create a buyer persona through questions
In this exercise, you should create at least 3 buyer personas. You can have different clients that are drawn to your products or services for different reasons. In this way, you can serve multiple audiences.
With the user in mind, think about their interests, what moves them, where they live. These ideas will help you understand what the key messages to deliver are.
When you do this, you will need a detailed description of someone who represents the target audience. You need to think of a name, address, demographic details, interests, behaviours, goals, pain points and common dislikes.
During this exercise, there are 4 questions you should include to create an almost three-dimensional buyer persona.
1 — What are their shopping habits?
We usually think that people buy all year round, but that may not be the case.
Shopping habits can be influenced by age, location, season, festivities and interests.
For example, people buy more at Christmas time and during the discount season. There can also be other high shopping points throughout the year like religious festivities, holidays, national celebrations or even local gatherings and fairs.
Use data from case studies to see how people consume in the regions you want to advertise in and get planning. National Independence Days can be a good opportunity for week-long campaigns, for example.
2 — What are their values?
It may be hard to admit, but people buy emotionally. In your buyer persona exercise, you can dive into understanding what moves your target audience.
Values can be seen as something important and worth preserving. They can be principles or behaviour standards referring to how people judge what’s important in life. You can use them to define your buyer persona.
This question is very useful for physical products. Luxury products, for example, need to be targeted to people who value “status” and want to differentiate themselves by the brands they use. But, conversely, someone who is price sensitive wants to know they are buying a good amount of quality for a just price.
Other values you can consider may involve privacy, quietness, ecology, sustainability, down-to-earth, visuals or comfort. These topics will add more volume to your buyer persona.
3 — What movies/books/music do they consume?
You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but getting someone’s reading list may be good information on which products might interest them.
If you read fantasy books, you are probably more willing to buy merchandise.
If you exercise regularly, you may like nutrition and health books. You can also apply this thinking to television series and current movies.
Find out what a given region is consuming on Netflix, for example. You can then see which are the most popular trends and how they relate to your business. You can use clever copywriting in your content to establish the connection.
Do more research on Facebook Groups about a specific theme and see if they talk about other topics so you can personalise your target audience.
4 — Describe their typical day
One good exercise is to picture a typical day in the “life” of one of your buyer personas.
Trace their steps: When do they get up? What do they eat for breakfast? How do they like their coffee? What do they do during their lunch hour — do they like to take a walk or grab a bite at the office? How do they commute? What do they do after hours?
These questions will bring out other characteristics and let you add more relevant information about behaviours and lifestyles. Commuting hours are good for advertising because people are more relaxed and looking at their phones.
These 4 questions will help you create buyer personas for your business to drive a better ad strategy. Use them to grow your online ads.
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