When you are writing for the intent of selling to a customer, you should be keeping your type of audience in mind at all times. A buyer persona is a helpful tool to do this by creating the type of reader you are writing for.
What Is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a writing tool to assist in directing your writing to a specific audience. You are essentially creating a character that acts as an imaginary stand-in audience for the kind you intend to write for.
When creating your imaginary customer, you can use a similar formula when writing fictional book characters when describing them and what they do.
For instance, what does your preferred customer do for a living? Are they a man or a woman? What kind of interests do they have? Which problems do they deal with that your product would solve?
Your buyer persona is painting your customer with words. It is easier to write towards a certain type of audience when you create one of those audience members as an example.
Why Do You Need One?
Well, you don’t. It’s just one of the many helpful writing tools you can use for writing audience-directed copy. For those who may be more visual learners, that is exactly what it caters to. You are visualizing your ideal customer or audience so that your writing can appeal to them more. I understand it can seem like extra work when all you want to do is get started on writing your main piece, but the numbers check out in their positive impact:
- 46% increase in conversions
- 100% increase in the number of pages visited
- 58% of content B2B marketers consider ‘audience relevance’ the most important factor for determining the effectiveness of content marketing efforts
- Companies who exceed lead and revenue goals are twice as likely to create personas than companies who miss these goals
How Do I Make a Buyer Persona?
If you aren’t sure where to start with creating a buyer persona, I understand; you’ll need to get the creative juices flowing. Here are a few helpful tips to make starting the process as easy as possible:
1. Do Your Research
Usually, you have a content brief before writing from your client or at least some idea of what you will be writing about. Before you start to write, sit down and think about what you are writing about, who it would appeal to most, and characterize them.
OptinMonster suggests looking back at your past audience to get an idea of what characterizations you should use for your buyer persona. No previous customers? OptinMonster suggests looking through your social media followers and maybe sending out a survey to get some ideas from your online community. Just starting out without social media? Look at your competitors’ customers.
2. Get In Their Head: What Does Your Ideal Buyer Need Help With?
You’re going to need to get into the mind of your ideal customer. What kind of problem are you trying to solve by writing to this audience? Use that purpose when creating your buyer persona. If you are writing copy geared towards environmentally friendly cleaning products, for example, what types of issues arise for your audience that would be solved by using your product?
Maybe it is a stay-at-home parent that is trying to bring more earth-friendly products into their home. Or perhaps it is a professional cleaning company that advertises having a smaller carbon footprint. A buyer’s persona helps guide you to grab the attention of your ideal reader.
3. Utilize Online Tools Available to You
I’ve referenced Neil Patel before in the past and I will continue to do so because he just knows what he’s talking about. According to him, a buyer persona is “a representation of your target customer’s preferences and behavior as they shop and interact with your online business.”
If you don’t know where to start with creating a buyer persona, Neil mentions that there are various websites that provide templates for you to get started but he personally recommends Xtensio.
I have never used Xtensio and usually make my personas from scratch but from personally looking through the website, it looks like it is a free service that is easy to use and it seems like a great place to start if you’re new. It’s also not specifically for buyer personas but can help you create a variety of different content like reports and case studies.
A Little Imagination Goes a Long Way
Good writing requires a little imagination (in my opinion). It really helps when you are writing copy aimed at selling, that you get inside the mind of your intended customer. Even with business or sales writing, a little creativity can help you immensely when writing copy that attracts customers and holds their attention.
For more helpful tips in writing good copy, you can check out my blog post here about using descriptive diction when marketing your product.
Have you ever written a buyer persona before? Was there anything you didn’t know before reading this blog post? Maybe you know a few tips that weren’t mentioned. Are you an Xtensio user? I’d love to know. Feel free to share in the comments!