Buyer personas for copywriting.
Buyer personas are a brilliant tool to help you focus your writing on your target audience. We use them in a copywriting context. But their use goes far beyond just the writing.
Beyond buyer personas for copywriting, you can use them:
- Across your marketing function, from designers to web developers;
- To train staff on customer interaction;
- And for new product development and other business planning activities.
So they are well worth investing in to bring broader benefits to your business.
What are buyer personas?
A buyer persona is a profile of your typical customer. It will describe any demographic characteristics that may be relevant such as age or gender. It will list what their objectives are in their interactions with you. And what their requirements are for working with you.
Very importantly, it will identify the relevant frustrations in your customers’ lives – the problems that you can solve for them – sometimes called pain points. And it will score how important certain drivers are in their buying decisions – like price or quality.
A buyer persona then wraps all this information up into a fictional person with a name that represents your ideal customer. You may well have more than one ideal customer. So you can generate as many buyer personas as you wish. We would advise that you keep them as internal documents, only sharing them with relevant people on your team.
Buyer personas for copywriting
Once we as writers have collected all this information, we have a hit list of points to cover when producing our copy. I often say to clients that one of the biggest mistakes you can make when writing for a business is write to the undifferentiated masses. Of course, it is usually the masses who will read it, but each person reads your copy as an individual. So if you can write to them as an individual, you can make that connection which will help them to engage with you. A buyer persona helps you to do this.
How do we create a buyer persona?
At On Point Copywriting we facilitate a discovery meeting with a business owner or manager in charge of marketing. During this, we will ask structured questions to get the information we need. It is not uncommon to be gathering the information to produce tone of voice guidelines at the same time, so the two documents often go hand in hand.
Typically, the clients we work with will have enough insight into their own clients/customers to provide the relevant information. But if they felt they didn’t, or wanted to gain new insight, then in a heightened service it could become a market research exercise.
After the meeting, we will go away and collate all the information into a polished finished article which we then present back to the business. This can then be held and used to educate staff or other marketing partners about their target market. Or used for strategic business planning.
On Point Copywriting buyer personas
If you are starting long-term projects with us, we will always recommend beginning with creating buyer personas (as well as tone of voice guidelines). As we have explained, they are a fantastic way to understand the target audience we are writing to. If you are interested in creating buyer personas for your business, get in touch with us on 0117 244 0116 to arrange a discovery meeting.
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