How many times in the past year or years have you heard about the phrase "buyer persona"?
A lot right? Well today I'm gonna try and shed some light into what a buyer persona is, why it
should be important to you and how you can use it to sell more, which I guess is interesting, yeah?
Let's go! Hey SEMrushers! It's Chiara here again and today as I said we talk about buyer personas.
Okay so let's start by defining what a buyer persona is: for SEMrush for example a buyer
persona could be this one that we have named Jason. Jason should definitely change his
barbershop but besides this, he's 27 and he owns an SEO agency in New York. He deals mostly with
clients related to the fashion world and he's a huge foodie and wine connoisseur. So Jason is a
buyer persona, which is a depiction of the ideal customer based on qualitative and quantitative
data, market research, and things that we know about existing customers. Understanding Jason
will help us make better decision about where and how to target this type of persona and keep
in mind that personas can be super highly detailed or pretty broad. It all depends on what you want
and how targeted you want to get. So who can benefit from buyer persona definition? Defined
buyer persona can be important beyond marketing, influencing many different processes across the
company: product development teams for example can craft product roadmaps to match the needs of
audiences, and also marketers use buyer personas to improve strategies and tactics. Think about it:
keyword research or developing ad copy or creating great content becomes much easier when you know
how the persona of Jason thinks and acts. Sales team for example can understand customers pain
points and challenges to polish their sales pitch and understand which product or service aspects to
highlight, and customer support teams can enhance the service they provide by knowing in advance
about the range of problems and challenges that the customers are facing right now.
The point is: the more we know about Jason, the more we actually know about our customers. So how
can we use buyer personas for strategic marketing decisions? Nine out of ten if you're watching this
you're a marketer, right? So you'll be interested in knowing how knowing exactly who Jason is
can help us make better marketing decisions. Well first of all it helps us do way better
customer segmentation. I mean marketing to everybody indistinctly, just everywhere,
was great in 1986 maybe? But not today: buyer personas can add powerful details that will help
marketers crush their goals and turn strategy into leads or better yet conversions. Second,
we can really tailor a personalized experience for Jason and that's extremely important.
If we know the personas pain points we can create specific content messaging offers
that will actually solve the real needs of the person that's on the other side of the screen.
And lastly strong persona modeling will help us finding where exactly the high value leads
are. Knowing where this very specific crowd of millions of Jasons hangs out
provides insight into which platform we can use to actually reach them. How do we create a buyer
persona template? Alright so everything sounds great till now but what kind of data do I need?
How do I actually form the person of Jason? I can answer that: first of all start with giving your
buyer persona a name and the photo like what we've done with Jason. It makes the persona even more
real. So first the basics as usual: demographics, age, gender, income, location, and other details.
Pay close attention to professional status such as job title and industry: this is info
that helps you target decision maker or users of actual products or services. Today we can
dig even deeper into psychographics: their values, opinions, hot button topics, and other info that
defines their global conversations. Never forget that marketing is powerful when it helps address
a specific pain point or a problem. Layer in the types of music or topics your customers listen to,
who they trust, the platform they spend most time on... now we're really getting to the core
of who Jason is! And remember we're targeting thousands or even millions of Jasons out there.
The icing on the cake? We examine how Jason makes actual buying decisions: this insight in fact
rounds out the buyer's journey. We now understand so much about our buyer personas and the things
that trigger them to act it almost makes it too easy to market to all of the Jasons out there!
Almost... Making buyer personas in the past used to be so much work and it used to take up so much
time, but hey we're SEMrush and we're here to help so in the description you'll find the template
that we just filled in together: you can use it for your buyer personas, it's for free of course!
How to find the data to create a buyer persona? So everything seems to be going great till now but
where do I actually find the data for that? Well there are two main routes: the first one
is market research, and we got you covered for that, the second one is existing customer data.
Let's dive into both of them! So let's start with data collection from existing customers:
try interviewing them! People are not as shy as they used to be about sharing their ideas and
opinions, try with interviews, filling out forms on your website, one-on-ones, group discussions,
anything! Just reach out because people are now ready to have this type of conversations.
And you also may want to offer some incentive like such an extra perk, a discount, a gift card,
early access to new products or other stuff. This is definitely gonna help. This can also help you
take a very hard look in the mirror: seeing flaws exactly as they're described from someone who's
using the website and that hasn't thought of it in the beginning when it was created is gonna give
you such great insights on flaws that you would have never seen. So here are the three main points
to remember: number one, what you want to ask for, customer pain points, challenges, obstacles, goals
and values. All of this is critical information. Number two, how and who to ask, google analytics,
sales team, the users themselves, all of these are viable options. And number three, what to do
once you actually have the info, combine google analytics insight along with facebook audience
insights data and what you got from your team and Jason really starts to take human form! Okay
we're almost at the finish line, let's talk about market research now. So step number one is:
explore the audiences of the biggest industry players. SEMrush has got you covered for that
with a tool that is called Market Explorer. So use Market Explorer to identify the biggest industry
domain in the country or countries where you do business. This powerful tool will automatically
determine the domain's industry and build a market overview that quickly shows a list of the biggest
market players within a given location. One by one choose websites from the list to get data on the
audience's average age and gender. Next up is to discover in-market audience interest. The market
audience interest table in Market Explorer will give you an idea of related topics of interest
for the shared audience: more pieces of the persona and the market puzzle to play
with! By uncovering what the audience is really interested in you can first of all
determine new partnerships and collaboration with resources and domains in related areas
or add specific offers to the product or even make design and cta's tweaks in ads and across the site
to boost conversions. Next up: identify the audience overlaps with other industry players
or potential partners. This information helps us understand how much the audience of a competitor
or a partner overlaps with ours, when we see an overlap in unique visitors with a competitor's
website we can be pretty sure the audience will be interested in the service products that we're
tasked with selling. The SEMrush's Audience Insight report within the Traffic Analytic
tool shows how many unique visitors browse both potential partners and competitors websites.
And last step I promise: learn how the target audience finds the competitor's sites.
So this is really cool: the Traffic Analytics Traffic Journey report, this is exactly where
competitors take their traffic from! So that's it, now we have a perfect picture of who Jason is,
our buyer persona, and where in the market we can go find thousands or millions of personas
just like him. If you have any other thoughts or opinions or ideas or questions even about the
topic of buyer personas please leave them in the comments below. I'll make sure to read everyone
and answer. And thank you so much for coming with me through this journey of buyer persona
creation! And thanks for getting to the end of the video, now I can actually say it: if you
liked it please subscribe to the channel, hit the like button, and activate the notification bell.
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