How to Use Buyer Personas for Better Conversion Rates

When we say “buyer persona”, what’s the first thing that pops into your head? 

If it’s a fictional or semi-fictional character representing a segment of your target audience, you’re on the right track. Buyer personas have evolved from being a lesser-known marketing technique to being your best bet at boosting conversion rates.

Creating and understanding your buyer personas is the first step to marketing success. 

Read on to learn the what, why, and how of buyer personas to improve your conversion rates.

What are Buyer Personas? 

A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer profile. It involves segmenting your audience based on their demographics and psychographics and answering questions such as:

• What is their age range?
• What is their budget?
• What makes them choose your brand?
• What are they looking for in their ideal product?
• Why are they choosing a specific product/service? 
• What would prompt them to buy that product again? 
• What difficulties do they face while carrying out a purchase?

Why are Buyer Personas Important?

Buyer personas help companies understand their customers better, leading to more effective marketing campaigns, more engaged users, and successful personalization of their advertising efforts.

Buyer personas also help brands target user search intent. Search intent is essentially the “why” behind every user’s search for a product, brand, service. Are they looking for information? Are they looking to purchase?

Understanding search intent through buyer personas is a great way to create better content and marketing campaigns. 

How to Use Buyer Personas for Better Conversion Rates?

Here’s an example of a buyer persona a movie streaming platform such as Netflix might create:

Broke Brandon

• 22 years old 
• A senior at NYU 
• Rents an apartment with 3 of his friends 
• Often walks/cycles to college 
• Is looking for an affordable streaming platform that offers:
  • Wide selection of movies and TV shows 
  • Multiple payment options, apart from major credit/debit cards 
  • Weekly, monthly, quarterly subscriptions 
  • Easy cancellation/renewal of subscription
  • An easy-to-navigate website and payment gateway 
  • Plans with profile sharing options
  • Prefers updates about the latest shows and movies on the platform via email

Speaking of sales, stats suggest over 90% of companies‘ sales come from 3-4 buyer personas. That’s the impact of diving deep into audience analysis and segmentation.

Now that we’ve got the basics laid out, let’s take a look at four ways how buyer personas can help boost conversion rates across channels.

Target your Customer’s Needs Better

Customers want products and services that cater to their exact needs. In fact, buyers are 48% more likely to opt for a product that is solution-specific and tailored to their business/personal needs.

Not creating buyer personas can lead to quite a few hitches in your conversion process, such as:

• Poor insights on what your customers actually want, i.e., poorly targeted products
• Targeting an irrelevant audience
• Creating products and services without key features that your users expect

So, creating solid buyer personas helps build well-targeted products and tailored engagement experiences.

Get Cutting-Edge Insights 

To see how well your products are performing, and how well your users would respond to a new one, user insights are a must. 

These insights go beyond website and social media analytics such as campaign reach, shares, likes, comments, etc.

User-specific insights are all about what the user thinks about your product and brand. But collecting these insights is a mammoth task, especially when you cater to a vast and diverse audience. 

The trick to fast, reliable insights? 

Buyer personas. 

Segregating your audience into personas that represent audience groups helps you collect data faster, and generalize those insights more accurately. Collecting these insights can be done through post-purchase surveys, email or social media-based feedback, or a simple “What are you looking for in XYZ product?” 

Crafting survey questions for each persona can greatly improve the quality of your insights. For example, Netflix’s Broke Brandon would respond better to questions such as “How likely are you to watch a <genre> movie recommended?” than “How would you rate Netflix on a scale of 1 to 10?” 

Specificity is the key to cutting-edge insights, as is seen when persona-based content increased customer engagement by a whopping 48%. Regularly asking your customers for feedback, inputs, recommendations for new features, and a simple quality check goes a long way for continued conversion rate improvements.

Humanize Your Interactions

The one thing that’ll get your users to prefer your brand? Humanizing your communications.

When customers interact with your brand (online or offline), they shouldn’t feel as if they’re talking to an automated response machine. 

Instead, they look forward to interacting with humanized content. This tip ties in with your content strategy as well: the more conversational and personalized your content will be, the better your buyers will respond to it.

Creating buyer personas helps brands target the right segment with the right type of interactions. For example, a 25-year-old freelance professional may prefer a more casual update via DMs, whereas a 64-year-old retiree may prefer an email update with simple, corporate speak.

So, use buyer personas to learn how your various audience segments prefer to interact with brands.

Create Effective Marketing Campaigns

No-brainer? Probably not. Many companies understand the importance of creating buyer personas to craft better marketing strategies but fall short in implementing personas in their ad campaigns. Be it Google ads or email-based campaigns, targeting the right segment of customers is the deal-clincher for great conversion rates. 

Here are a few impressive stats on the success of persona-based marketing campaigns:

• Email open rate increases by 2-5 times when personalized emails are sent to users
• A 14% increase in CTR is noticed after crafting persona-specific emails 
• Keeping buyer personas in mind helps make websites 2-5 times easier to navigate for users 
• Persona-based SEO tactics boost organic reach by 55%

So, while creating ad copy or marketing content, ask yourself, “If I were the customer, what would drive me to interact with this content?”. Thinking from the viewpoint of your buyer persona can help you craft well-directed, engaging content.

Different content types (blogs, videos, memes) receive different levels of engagement from different personas. Keeping a close eye on the performance of your social media posts, email campaigns, ads, etc. across age groups can give you useful insights.

While creating a one-size-fits-all marketing campaign may seem like the easy way to go about it, creating well-researched buyer personas is what gives a huge push to your marketing efforts in the long run.

This also means regularly updating your buyer personas and collecting user insights to boost your campaigns’ effectiveness and conversion rates. So, if you haven’t already created your buyer personas, it’s time to get to work!