OK, so you’ve finally done it: You’ve set up your business blog. It looks great and you’ve got the new-hire raring and ready to steamroll Google with a flurry of SEO-friendly entries. Simple as that – piece o’ cake, even.
Right?
… Well, not quite.
Enter: the art of crafting a buyer persona.
Here’s the 411: Though you can craft well-trafficked blog entries that will inevitably help your brand, failing to understand who you want to be landing on your pages could mean you’re not getting the most out of your investment. Buyer personas are, in short, archetypal (but research-based!) characterizations of people you hope to read your blog – your ideal customers or clients, with all their unique behaviors and needs. Understanding the demographics of customer personas for your business blog is a critical component of your content marketing success.
Knowing who they are is crucial to developing frame and context in blog writing and, ultimately, to pinpointing (and segmenting) your desired audience, generating sales leads and – you guessed it — improving your bottom line.
The question to pose first and foremost when creating a new blog entry? What, you must ask, is the intent of this blog post?
From there, visualize your buyer persona to help make your entries more specific. Below, a few bullet-point notes on how to go about doing that:
- Make sense of what you already know. If you’re an established business, comb through your analytics and data on customer demographics as a jumping-off point.
- Find out where they’re comfortable? Research where you’d expect your customers to spend their time while browsing the Web. You want customers/readers to feel both engaged and at ease with your content.
- Consider what you’re offering. What is it that your business and (by extension) blog is offering to the potential reader/customer that aids them? The trick is to not to just make them click on the page, but to get them to stay there. (And, of course, to come back.)
- Do some anecdotal research. You likely have daily interactions with clients/customers – take advantage of your one-on-one time to learn more about them. What do they do in their free time? What are they most curious about when they’re researching your product/services? Consider it easy access to an on-point, realistic buying persona.
- What’s your client’s background? This is most important if you’re targeting clients – you may want to do some research on who some realistic readers would be. They might be a manager for a medium-sized business, a director at a university or particularly passionate about a certain type of company culture.
Keeping the above in mind, creating your actual profile persona is a bit like piecing together a puzzle. You’ll want to take the above questions/considerations to compile a profile outline as a basic guideline for how to write in a way that is more human and pithy, as well as how to craft landing pages that are proposing desirable sales offers.
Basic outline for developing buyer personas:
Name: Give them a real name, and an identity – say, Home Builder Bob.
Demographics: Is your customer married? Maybe with kids? Are they a city-dweller, or have they settled down in the ‘burbs? How about income? Salaried, or hourly?
Job Title: Combined with demographics, it’s the basis for everything else you’ll fill out in the profile. It’s also innate subtext for the type of language to use – if nothing else, you can use the typical job, age and geographic location of a person to get a sense for how to communicate on their level.
Habits: Are they Facebook types, or are they using LinkedIn? (Perhaps just email?) What words are they likely to be typing into a search box?
Hurdles: Identifying challenges is how you’ll most effectively communicate with your reader – here, then, is how you’ll learn to have a deft, empathetic touch with your writing. Think about: How much free time do they have? Are they organized? Is there a problem specific to their position you can help with?
Goals: Maybe they’re looking for a change in their personal or company perception, or desire new tools, or are looking for a complete change-up in their professional career. Figure out why they found your blog in the first place, and go from there.
I find this system very effective but I'd love to hear from you. Please share any steps in the process that you're using and add to the conversation!
When making your online presence known, you need to have a persona in order for you to develop a relationship with your readers. Business transactions are about relationships.
Glad you found this helpful, James.
Thinking through your client’s background E.J. sets you up to build a powerful persona. Thanks!
Hi Ryan, happy to hear this was helpful for you.
Buyer personas are a very useful tool. They are “characterizations of people you hope to read your blog – your ideal customers or clients, with all their unique behaviors and needs.” and to develop you BP, you can begin by analyzing the data you gather from site analytics. Consider this question… Where do your visitors come from and how do they get there?
Basic outline for developing buyer personas talks about informative ideas. When you are done all the shared tips correctly, it will surely helpful for strategic asset and deliver a real competitive advantage.
I have shared this comment in the content syndication and social bookmarking and networking website for Internet marketers – kingged where this post was found.
Glad you found this helpful, Metz. Thank you for sharing!
I started to learn to use blogs to reach customers and build wider
Personal branding for business progress. Very great tips to try
Thanks, Budi. Blogging can certainly help you connect with your audience on many levels, and build upon your brand as a whole. Good luck with your business.
Developing buyer persona is important. This strategy helps to increase conversion rate. If a business readily employ the best approach for persona, then it becomes easy to hit the right target customer at every point in time.
The what, where, why, who, and when of a customer must be properly define when putting strategies in place for the best buyer persona.
Well, the killer tips shared here are on track. I bet every marketer should follow this tip “Find out where they’re comfortable? Research where you’d expect your customers to spend their time while browsing the Web. You want customers/readers to feel both engaged and at ease with your content.”
I have shared this same comment in kingged.com where this post was shared and “kingged” for internet marketers.
Sunday – kingged contributor
Thank you, Sunday. You’re right on track about researching and knowing the 5 W’s before strategizing your buyer personas. The research phase is key.
Thanks for sharing, really a lot to take in, still trying to develop my blog to make it more reader friendly but developing a persona is vital to building relationships online. But like any online business we all have to start somewhere.
Hi Justin- Yes, we all have to start somewhere. Take your time in researching your audience, this will help you develop your personas and build lasting relationships.
Hi Ileane and D.J.,
It took me a few minutes to realize that what you define as a ‘buyer persona’ I’ve been calling my customer avatar! 🙂
I actually have a few pictures of people that I’ve determined are exactly the ones my message is for.
Simplicity is best, and you hit the nail on the head with figuring out why we are blogging in the first place. Purpose, to help my customer avatar solve their problem.
Thanks for your thought-provoking article!
– Carol Amato 🙂
Hi Carol,
Looks like we’re on the same page. I like that you went a step further and have a picture to match your personas. Thanks for your feedback!
Since most of my blogs are not really sales-oriented, this hasn’t really come to mind. This is a good thing to practice though for those who have blogs that do. I’m hoping to sell my IT services soon though and will keep this in mind.
Hi, Mike. You’re spot on. These tips could translate to blogging in general.
Before creating your persona, you must create your audience persona so that you can connect with them easily. This also makes sure that you’re not wasting your time and efforts.
Great feedback, Pankaj. It’s important to take a step back sometimes and take the time to truly understand your audience and what they value.
Great tips, I also think it is very important to bring value to people in what you do. If you know a lot about your area of business, then you should definitely be sharing your information and knowledge with your audience. value will bring people back everytime.
Thanks, Thomas. Couldn’t agree more–“value will bring people back every time.”
Hello Dealy,
I did find this post really useful as well. Very great tips there.
I really found this helpful. I especially liked the “Consider what you’re offering” point. You can get really bogged down blogging and keeping your goals in mind can help you when you hit the bogging wall and dont know what to put in the post
Hi, E. J.
Thanks for sharing persona prospective. Even if the reader is not making a money purchase a site is still selling its persona that is personality makes people come back I hope!
Well creating persona is really essential for online business and we gonna need to work on it eventually. Your tips are really useful.
Thanks for share.
Hi E.J,
Great share.I do agree with all the above points of yours.i really appreciate where you said that we should consider about our offer. It is true that we must concern about the offers that we are offering to our customers and surveying that it is proving helpful for them or not.Thanks for sharing such a great blog.
Very true. The successful business persona reels in likely to be satisfied customers. There are always those grumpy customers, so these tips really will help!
Hi, Dealy!
It is important to develop your buyer persona. As far as I know, buyer persona is a useful strategy that helps you increase your conversion rate. In order to target the right customers easily, you, as a business, must use the right approach for your buyer persona.
The basic outline that you’ve shared for developing a buyer persona is indeed helpful. I’m not actually familiar with the entire concept of buyer personas, but with the help of this article, I’ve learned more about it.
I must say that marketers should try this on and follow the killer tips you’ve given.
Thanks for the shared knowledge! 🙂
-Pauleen
Anyway, I’ve found this post shared on Kingged, and leave this comment there.
I find developing personas really helps people to talk about specifics and to get away from subjective opinions of I think this you think that. Having a good image for the persona is really important. I normally create a persona after creating a value proposition canvas which looks summarises their wants, needs and substitutes. Thanks for sharing.
Hi Dealy,
Thanks for this awesome post.
I would like to say that not only business blog, building persona is an important part of building any blog. Branding is an important element of the blog. You are the face of the blog, what you do reflects in the blog.
Thanks for the valuable tips, just what I needed.
Thanks,
Sayantan
I built my persona through blogwalking and replying to comments at my blog. So there we will interact with our blog reader
Great post that is surely helpful to my business. Being able to establish a relationship with your clients is important and for them to know who you are and what you can offer them is vital information.
I fully agree with you that you should think about your targeted audience. But before that there’s a step so many people miss: research who your audience is. It’s better to spend more time at this phase but know exactly the portrait of your targeted audience. than it will be easy to understand where these people spend time online, their habits, etc
Finding your ‘Ideal Customer’ is a skill that may take professional help to assist you. Once you know who you are communicating with, it clarifies your message, and allows you to see your busienss from your prospect’s point of view.
Great post, thanks.
Excellent post which is very helpful to grow your online business. follow these step are very much beneficial in this regard. Thanks for sharing nice article.
Wonderful post and I found it very useful for me to start business blog on the product that what my brother selling on local market. This can help him and me on getting good profits and thanx for your suggestions and wonderful article
Nice post. It will definitely grow our business. I agree with you that you should think about your audience first. than it will be easy to understand where these people spend time online, their habits, etc., Thanks for sharing this wonderful article with us.
Great Post, Thanks for all the free information to help get us all get a competitive edge over the competition that are pureling looking at making money rather than adding real value.. I like to always say to myself create the inevitable (great content)..
A Couple of questions though.. When you say look through your analytics data and user demographics to see where your users are comfortable, do you mean actually which pages get the highest engagement or where you receive most referrals from (type of site) or which geographic location the wealth of your traffic comes from, as these could all be useful to look at I would imagine, eg you may run a blog on cooking recipes and happen to get a lot of referrals from another blog that is on healthy living for example, which could indicate you should would do well with a post about healthy nutritious recipes. What if you have an elearning blog and only rank well for certain courses you offer, so that is where you get most engagement on the site, how should you interpret that as.. does it mean write for your current audience or does it mean you should cover the less popular areas to increase engagement?
I am riddled with questions like this which prevent me burning the boat and pushing full steam ahead sometimes, as you can never be sure where to put most of your energy! I guess you should try to do a bit of everything and see what works best, but then you can spread yourself a little thin and end up falling behind the competition..
i wanted to develop my business blog. And I was looking for some unique tips. Thanks for such tips which have benefited us.
Hey EJ
a very important point you raise here. Have a goal for your post and an audience in mind. Don’t just write for whoever.
I used to do that in the beginning, having no idea what I was really doing, then I realised the true path – personas!
Great tip that everyone needs to get their head around
thanks for sharing
ashley
We don’t currently have a blog, but are thinking of getting one to help engage with our audience and customers. Creating a persona for the blog sounds like a great idea, even categories specific for users of our company or even for the customers themselves to give feedback to employee posts, thanks for sharing the tips.
I wanted to improve my business blogging skills so thank you for this useful information. building a audience is very import so i strongly agree that we should think about our audience first.
Thanks for this great post and perspective. It makes sense to put time into developing the persona and create content based on that. It would certainly create a great connection with a prospect.
I have mainly focused on the hurdles and goals for a person but will definitely start focusing on the other items that you suggest.
Great stuff! Thanks agin.
I write about science, health, and human behavior. Things I believe is of interest to most people. Insofar as persona goes, getting to the point quickly and not boring the reader is the key to drawing them in.
Thanks for sharing this E.J., what others have said is spot on – it is all about the relationships we build. I think that by building personas like this for customers helps us to understand how to build such relationships – we need to know what makes them tick!
Hi EJ,
By fulfilling what is required by the audiences and they love what they got and the audiences always wait another good information from us. We are making good relationship with our personas.
Thanks.
Nice post and I found it very useful for me to start business blog on the product that what my brother selling on local market. This can help him and me on getting good profits and thanx for your suggestions and wonderful article
Dearly very informative article, building an online persona is more like building a relationship and putting a sense of belonging to the reader. Our business specializes in writing research and essays and building a reputable persona is inevitable, the readers and the clients want to have a one on one with the service provider. Powerful message over there. Thanks for sharing
Hey Ileane,
I Agree That Business Blog Is Incomplete Or You Can Useless If We Fails To Develop Personas…:)
Business Needs Good Conversation And Relationship Building Is Also Necessary There To Get Your Customer Again At Your Store.
Thanks For The Great Tips 🙂
I use social groups on linkedin, FB and twitter to analyse, select and choose my buying personas.