02: Create Buyer Personas to Attract the Ideal Customer

LEARN EVERYTHING YOU CAN ABOUT YOUR AUDIENCE

‘What’s a buyer persona?’ 

‘How do I attract the ideal customer?’

‘Why does it matter to my business growth?’

We’re glad you asked because before you can properly market your product or service, you must know whom you are selling to, where they hang out, and what challenges they face. In addition, you’ll need to understand their pain points, who or what influences their buying decisions, and from which sources they gather information.

To answer the first question above, a buyer persona is a detailed description or profile of someone representing your ideal customer. 

You’ll want to include the following attributes when creating your buyer personas:

• Jobs-to-be-done 
• Circumstances
• Desired outcomes 
• Interests, motivations, and needs
• Behavioral traits
• Pain points and struggles
• Buying patterns

The more detailed your buyer personas are, the better. We’re not making assumptions or categorizing people into groups. 

People that buy The Wall Street Journal don’t do so because

• They’re 40
• They’re married
• They graduated from an Ivy League school

They buy for deeper reasons. Those deeper reasons are what make great content.

Not sure where to start? 

Feeling overwhelmed? 

We have good news. 

Most of the information you need to create a buyer persona and attract the ideal customer already exists. We’ll get into the details of creating buyer personas a little further down the page. Before we do, let’s talk through the kinds of customer information that will help you create effective social media messages.

3 Types of Jobs-To-Be-Done

Let’s dig deeper into the jobs-to-be-done attribute. Ask yourself, ‘What is my customer trying to accomplish?’ The answer to this question is what we call the primary job. Here are the three aspects of a job:

Functional jobs – The core task or underlying process your customer tries to complete in a given situation. The job is what the customer is ultimately trying to accomplish.

Examples of functional jobs-to-be-done:

• Learning to play the piano
• Providing a secure way to make online payments
• Repairing a flat tire
• Protecting against identity theft
• Using AI and self-service platforms to handle staff requests

Emotional jobs – Describes how customers want to feel or their attitudes when executing the core functional job.

For the person learning to play the piano, the emotional job-to-be-done might be admiration from family and friends for their musical ability. 

Social jobs – Focuses on how the customer wants to be perceived by others while executing a job.

Arriving on time for a meeting is a functional job-to-be-done, and the social job is looking professional in front of your peers. 

While your product or service must meet the needs of the functional job, addressing the emotional and social jobs is important in fully understanding your customer’s needs.

Consider Your Customers’ Circumstances

Do you know what’s happening in your customer’s life that’s driving them toward a new solution? Circumstances help us understand what the customer is currently experiencing and allow us to join the conversation happening inside their head. 

Comprehending our customers’ circumstances is more important than product attributes or demographic information. Plus, when we understand where our customers are at, we in turn learn the experience they hope to create once they’ve successfully achieved their primary job-to-be-done.

Discover Desired Outcomes

Also known as the dream state, desired outcomes are the end state your customer wants to achieve. Ask yourself, 

• What does a job well done look like for my customer?
• What is the result of the transformation?

While a customer may hire the product or service for the same functional job, the desired outcomes could be different. 

A teenager learning to play the piano wants to start a band –a functional outcome. Whereas the company CEO wants to impress colleagues at an annual holiday party when she nails a piano sonata –a social job.

Document Your Buyer Personas

Collecting and documenting customer information takes the guesswork out of marketing and allows you to craft content and messaging targeted specifically to your persona(s). Audience personas also keep you focused on addressing customer priorities (think jobs-to-be-done and desired outcomes) instead of your own priorities. And ultimately, well-researched, detailed personas impact the effectiveness of your social media messages.

Aren’t you ready to create your buyer personas?

Recall from earlier that the information you need to create a buyer persona already exists. It lives with your current customers and subscribers. Trial users. Website visitors. Prospects and even past customers.

Buyer personas can be created by conducting and compiling

• Interviews of your target audience
• Surveys 
• Market research 

You’ll want to speak with and survey a mix of people including:  

• Current customers and subscribers
• Prospects and past customers
• Trial users and website visitors
• Those outside your contacts database who align with your target audience

Next review and synthesize information from your

• Existing customer database and social media audiences
• Social media analytics, especially Facebook Audience Insights and Google Analytics

PRO TIP: Think about your audience persona every time you make a decision about your social media marketing strategy (or overall marketing strategy).

In some cases, you’ll need to survey or interview your existing customers in order to flesh out your personas. 

In other cases, you may be intimately familiar with the characteristics that make up your ideal customer. 

Are you ready to start creating buyer personas?

Let’s jump right in!

Don’t miss the other chapters of the six-step social media strategy guide

01: Create Social Media Marketing Goals >>>  03: Learn How to Conduct an Audit of Your Social Media