In today’s market, it is essential to have a well-defined marketing persona. It serves as the “alter ego” of your business — a virtual customer of sorts. The marketing persona allows you to gain insights into how to market your products properly.
Without one, marketing teams will be scrambling for ways to properly promote their products and services to their audience!
Your best path is to ask expert advice from a marketing agency that knows the ins and outs of developing e-commerce personas. But you should at least know what it takes to develop one yourself.
Let’s discuss why it’s important for eCommerce businesses to have a well-defined marketing persona and how it will grow sales!
What Is a Marketing Persona + Factors To Consider
A marketing persona is the representation of your ideal customer. You should target him or her using marketing strategies in line with who they are.
As a result, you can find and appeal to potential customers to buy your products or services.
The easiest way to approach this is by identifying your brand archetype as explained in the book “The Hero and the Outlaw” by Carol S. Pearson and Margaret Mark.
They discuss the following archetypes that inhibit our consciousness. Our familiarity with these archetypes stems from our exposure to them from stories and legends that we’ve heard and read through the years.
Below is a shortlist of archetypes identified in the book:
- Ruler – leaders in their respective industries.
- Hero – continuously strives to achieve something others can’t.
- Outlaw – determined to make a change in the world.
- Caregiver – supports and nurtures the well-being of others.
- Innocent – Has an idea of the world as simple and happy.
- Regular Guy – blends in as part of a community and avoids standing out.
- Sage – has an unquenchable knowledge for the truth to understand the world better.
- Creator – passionate about building and creating things.
- Jester – entertains others through joy and humor.
- Explorer – sets out for an adventure and undergoes new experiences.
- Magician – focuses on radical transformation akin to a miracle.
- Lover – Promises beauty to help create desire from others.
Using any of the archetypes above allows you to fashion your marketing strategy based on its description above. You can then target the right people that resonate with the archetype you are promoting.
However, it’s also possible to share qualities from different archetypes above — your brand can be a combination of Ruler, Jester, and Love. In this case, you need to dig deeper to determine the best approach to your marketing.
To do this, you must identify the factors based on your target or existing customers.
When you’ve created your personas, you’ll have a better grasp of the persona you must assume as a brand. You’ll also gain insight into the kinds of strategies you must use for your campaigns.
Demographics
You have to know who your customers are before you can sell them anything. You need to know their needs and wants, where they live, their income, and so on.
Knowing the target demographic of your business is the first step towards effective marketing.
A demographic is a subgroup of the population. Job titles, age, sex, race/ethnicity, and geographic location are all demographics.
You can use the gathered customer demographics to determine who will purchase the most product and provide the most profit. They can also be used for product development and other aspects of a business.
If your business hasn’t built a customer base yet, you can identify the target demographic based on your products.
For example, if you’re selling baby products like strollers, your target demographics are married couples in the 25-44 age bracket. You can break down their demographics into jobs, educational backgrounds, incomes, and others.
Choosing your demographic based on your products and services is a good way to come up with marketing strategies.
However, it’s much better if you already have irrefutable data from current, active customers.
From here, you can analyze their profiles and determine the demographics of your customers.
Goals
The next step to create your buyer personas for your marketing is by identifying their goals.
Goals refer to the objectives and aspirations of your ideal customer based on their demographics. In other words, these are the things that drive them to purchase or use a product.
Their goals don’t have anything to do with the product directly. For example, they want to spend more time with their families, but your site is selling mountain bikes.
By finding the right angle, customers reach their objectives by buying your product.
Owning a mountain bike allows them and their families to become more adventurous as they explore the outdoors together.
It’s all about finding angles for your products in relation to their goals.
Hobbies and Interests
Interests and hobbies are a great way to learn more about your customers, which is useful for creating targeted campaigns.
Customers will be more likely to remember the message if they can relate it back to something that interests them. This is a great way for eCommerce businesses to create relationships with their customers; instead of just one-time transactions.
The best way to track this variable is to listen to what they have to say on social media. Using tools like Mention or Awario allows you to see what your target audience loves or is interested in.
Pain Points
Customer pain points are challenges a customer has while using your product. For example, if a user is having trouble setting up an account on your website, that is a pain point.
Understanding customer pain points is important for fixing or addressing those challenges.
From a marketing perspective, knowing your customers’ pain points allow you to provide more personalized campaigns and customer service. Additionally, you can use their feedback to find better products and services to sell, if not actually improve them.
Referral Traffic
Customers can find your eCommerce business in many ways. They could have found you from links to your website posted on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.
They are most likely to find your store through search engines. Your site will show up on Google when people search for your products if you optimize for target keywords.
Another way that customers find out about your site is through referrals. They may have gotten in touch with your past or existing customers and recommended buying a product from your site.
However, you’ll only know for sure where most of them found you if you find out for yourself.
Look at Google Analytics and check the referral traffic you received over time.
From here, you’ll be able to pinpoint where they found you. You’ll also see the link source they clicked that led them to your site.
This information will help lead you to potential new prospects who are searchers or followers like these existing ones.
Developing a Marketing Persona For Your eCommerce Business
Upon developing the persona template, you should be able to develop strategies and create effective campaigns for your audience.
Below are items that you can take action on with the help of your newly minted marketing persona:
- Focus on channels that drive traffic and conversions – Instead of spreading yourself thinly on different platforms, dedicate your resources to channels that generate ROI for your business. For example, if most of your customers are coming from social media, focus on content for Facebook or Twitter. You can launch ads on those channels to further scale your marketing efforts.
- Create more personalized campaigns – Using the customer persona, you can craft campaigns that play off their goals, pain points, interests, and others. This allows your sales team to better connect with your marketing persona, which could lead to more sales!
- Get more insightful data for your business – Because you have a better grasp of your target customers, you can develop marketing campaigns tailor-made to your audience. You’ll also be able to gather accurate website data and insights based on your efforts to market your business. This allows you to tweak your tactics and strategies based on how your audience responded to them.
Conclusion
Don’t forget that creating a marketing persona is a crucial step in the process of creating a successful e-commerce business. A well-created persona helps to create campaigns that resonate with your customers, whether you’re selling on social media or through email.
We at Romain Berg can help you develop this type of marketing plan for your business. We’ve shared some tips about how to do so yourself if you want to take matters into your own hands.
What kind of persona would work best for your company? Contact us today if you need assistance!
