Buyer Personas: The Online Business Booster You Want – Part 2 (Plus Free 5-Step Guide + Persona Temp

We completed a ton of research and planning around how to build buyer personas. Creating these personas are even more fun. Much like kicking-off the party now that the research is done and the logistics are planned.

Step 4: Get down to creating your user personas

Compile all the research you have done so far and start grouping common features. Get down to the specifics. Remember it’s a person you are building.

Let us take the example of a 26-year-old, experimental, urban, digital content creator. Maybe you call him Aeden. Sketch him out in more details to make him seem like a person in flesh and blood. Does he stay with family or a bachelor pad? Does he stay in upmarket Bandra in Mumbai or suburban Malad? Does he have a bike or a car? If you own a start-up coffee brand, you can market your coffee to Aeden to keep him awake for his late-night productions, as he comes back after a spin in his bike with his friends.

Move on to more personas for your coffee-brand. An older 35-year-old woman. How does she look? Is her hair long or short? What does she do? Think of other possible people in your different market segments. Create about 3 to 5 such audience persona to cover all possible target groups. Remember to look beyond the obvious. Find answers to what really makes them buy something. It will help you form unique reasons on why they should be following, engaging with your brand or even buying your brand over other brands.

Finally, put it all down. Print this easy template to fit your user persona details and use it as a ready reckoner.

Step 5: Put the personas to work.

Once the personas are made, it’s time to apply them into real life. A Marketing Sherpa case study2 found that buyer personas resulted in a 111% increase in email open rate, and a 100% increase in the number of pages visited. There are many ways you can maximize these user persona templates too:

• Going through them over and over is likely to help you ignite possible marketing campaign ideas. List them all down, without judging whether they will work or not.

• Pick the most relevant marketing campaign, and start outlining your messaging strategy around it. This will amp up your marketing, sales and branding initiatives.

• You can also note down possible search keywords for your blog creation and social media work around your brand. When you use the buyer’s vocabulary, you can help them find you more easily.

• You can send personalized emails that address the needs of users precisely.

• You can innovate and adjust your offerings basis the responses of these user personas, to fit their life better.

• You can train your sales team, and other personnel more effectively by giving them relatable people to work with.

What next: Your story on your store

Once your user persona is created, what you need is the right platform to leverage it for your brand. You need a one-stop D2C eCommerce growth platform that helps you leverage AI to drive personalization.

You can enable your online business to reflect your unique brand identity. And once they start resonating with you, you can tailor their buyer journeys by combining their behavioral traits with a suite of sophisticated offerings.

To understand this better, let’s push back to a 2017 report published by Gartner1, one of the top marketing research companies in the world. It introduced a new concept called “Augmented Analytics” which they called the “future of data analytics”. It uses AI and ML to enhance data analytics for more people to get value from data and generate better insights. Seen from the user persona lens, this can be a goldmine allowing you to outline your way forward with as much precision and personalization as possible.

Shoptimize provides you these augmented analytics on an intuitive and customizable dashboard. It maps user transactions to their lifestyle choices to create deterministic segmentation cohorts. So if you are a healthy smoothie brand, you can implement augmented analytics to automate the process of discovering patterns in the way your audience buys from you. Know the popular months or days, preferred flavors such as strawberry or spinach, favorite toppings like sweet corn or water chestnuts, first time versus repeat visitors, high value buyers versus window shoppers and more.

With this kind of exploratory analytics at hand, you may just be scratching the tip of your consumer iceberg. For the more you know about your prospective buyers, the better your chances of selling to them.

The journey that begins by targeting a user persona fructifies with the right messaging reaching the right people. Thus cohort-based analysis is at the heart of hyper-personalization. It helps you sharp shoot your products or any in-website campaigns to the most relevant users.

According to a report by Boston Consulting Group (BCG)2, marketers and retailers that have implemented such personalization strategies, likely derived by such user persona-led strategies, see sales gains of 6–10%, a rate two to three times faster than others who have not implemented it.

Powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), with Shoptimize, you can create dynamic content messaging tailored to the user persona. You can build your own creatives as per your messaging for a specific user persona. You may have the same proposition but you may choose to target these to two different user personas.

Consider these two different messages on the home page banner of your smoothie brand eCommerce store:

Creating buyer personas is like digging deeper for your online store to grow bigger. For the first time, you will communicate not to a mass or a target group, but to real people. You will not just run a campaign but will imagine sitting down and speaking to them. You will listen to them, and respond, allowing your business to build on real values. Because only a business built on real values endures the test of time and tide.