Once you have a solid grasp on who your buyer personas are, you can apply it to customer acquisition to build a loyal customer base.
It turns out novelists aren’t the only people who create characters. Ecommerce marketers do, too. Why? To ensure brands are getting the best possible return on investment (ROI) from their marketing and advertising efforts.
Casting a wide net and hoping your messaging sticks is expensive. Meanwhile, marketing to specific types of people is more cost-effective and generally bolsters success rates.
Creating buyer personas for your ecommerce brand helps you get an idea of who’s buying from you and why. According to HubSpot, these are “semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.” Once you have a solid grasp on this information, you can apply it to customer acquisition to build a loyal customer base.
You may already have a decent idea of who frequents your store and what they expect. But a truly useful customer profile goes deeper by incorporating concrete data.
Create accurate buyer personas by understanding your audience behavvior online and what they want from a store like yours.Click To Tweet
These examples illustrate the information your brand needs to create a buyer persona template:
- Persona name
- Job type and role
- Demographic information (age, gender, location, income bracket, education level, etc.)
- Goals for using your site (and how you can make their experience easier)
- Challenges/anxieties during the buying process
- Most effective marketing message for this persona
- Preferred shopping methods (i.e. mobile, desktop, etc.)
It’s also beneficial to delve into each buyer persona’s overall internet usage. If you sell furniture online, having a better understanding of where your customers spend time on social media will help you refine your marketing endeavors. If Facebook drives most of the social traffic your store receives, you can set your sights on both paid and organic content marketing on that platform.
Various buyer personas will spend time online differently, so it’s a matter of discovering where to rack up impressions and drive traffic, based on your customer composites. Getting your hands on the data behind your buyer personas typically requires delving into Google Analytics—or a comparable platform—for demographic and source details.
Another way to learn more about your customer base is ask them. Who knows better than a shopper what they’re truly looking for in an ecommerce website? Creating a short survey with no more than 10 questions can help you discover your average buyer’s journey, from hearing about your company to making a purchase. Aim to uncover customers’ behavioral drivers here. Ask past customers about their reasons for buying from your store, challenges they encountered in the sales funnel and how they felt about their overall experience. You can use these answers to further refine your idea of a catchall buyer persona for your store.
The end goal of creating accurate buyer personas is understanding your target audience: who they are, how they behave online and what they want from a store like yours. While a target audience tends to be broader and less specific, buyer personas create real instances of fictional people who very well could be any existing customer. Character studies transform an intangible crowd of people into a specific, helpful case study. Marketing to thousands of people is a great way to blow through your budget supporting create generic campaigns with lackluster results. Targeting people who match proven customers helps boost ROI and make people feel as if you’re speaking directly to them.
Creating buyer personas for your ecommerce brand is a way to personalize your messaging and streamline your website for your target audience at large. Get creative and create templates for these fictional—but important—customers.
