Does Your Small Business Need Buyer Personas?

Let's say that you sell running shoes. Some of your customers might want shoes for marathons, triathlons, and other major athletic events. Many of your customers might want them for casual jogs around the block. Others could need running shoes for long endurance jaunts over rough terrains. That's why you need buyer personas.

A buyer persona defines a specific target customer. It's a fictional biography of the person to whom you want to sell, and since your business targets different types of customers, you need buyer personas if you want your marketing efforts to work.

Income Levels

Whether you sell products or services, you likely have different pricing levels. You can create buyer personas with different income levels so you know how to target them with offers they can afford.

For instance, maybe you sell website design services. Your pricing tiers and related services could target start-ups, small businesses, and enterprise-level businesses. Each target persona will have a different budgetary range.

Similarly, if you sell jewelry, you might keep inventories of everything from costume pieces to six-figure settings. If you don't have buyer personas, you can't direct your marketing messages to the right consumers.

Needs and Desires

Motivation is a major part of marketing. Whether you're pursuing email marketing, text marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, or something else entirely, your message needs to revolve around the benefits your target customer can derive from your product or service.

Maybe you run a home security company. Some of your customers live in high-crime areas and want to protect their homes and businesses from potential burglars or vandals. Others have small children they want to protect. Some might worry about protecting valuables inside their homes.

All of these motivations should be built into your buyer personas. Otherwise, you won't know what wording to use in your persuasive text marketing and other efforts.

Lifestyle

Buyer personas are also necessary for establishing important lifestyle choices that your target customers make. For example, if you run a fitness e-commerce store, you'll need to target personas based on their lifestyle habits and goals, such as losing weight, gaining energy, improving strength, or increasing flexibility.

Knowing these details can help you craft text marketing messages that resonate with your target audience.

Challenges

What challenges do your target customers face? These will vary based on their situations.

You might notice that service-oriented businesses often offer different tiers of services based on what the target customer needs or wants. For instance, Dropbox addresses many different challenges on its homepage. Its customers might want to increase data security, store their photos and videos, work collaboratively with people on a shared project, and more.

Each of these challenges can be roped into your buyer personas. That way, when you send marketing messages, you hit on pain points that your prospects understand.

Buyer personas aren't just a luxury or a buzzword. They're essential if you want to take your text marketing strategy to the next level, and they can influence all of your other content marketing campaigns. If you want to test text marketing on your buyer personas, sign up for free . See how easy it is to communicate effectively with your target market.