If you don’t know your target audience is, then there’s a big difference between the people you should be reaching versus your current audience.

That’s what creating a Buyer Persona (BP) is for. I have seen the term used many times in different places but I realize that not everyone has heard about it or really knows what it means.

So here’s the original description: Buyer Persona are research-based modeled representations of who buyers are, what they are trying to accomplish, what goals drive their behavior, how they think, how they buy, why they make buying decisions and when they decide to buy.
If your goal is to inspire prospective customers to call you and say,”I want this, how can I get it?” Then you need to do research via these 3 things:

Sales interviews
Customer interviews
External research

The results you get help you get the right content to the right people at the right time. We all want to build relationships that result in sales.
Here are 8 components you should know from your research:

Day in life
Problems
Orientation
Obstacles
Objectives
Questions
Preferences
Engagement scenarios

Conduct your interviews as a conversation and not an interrogation.
Here are the 6 of the 8 Components to create a Buyer Persona with depth.

Day in the life – this allows you to step in your persona’s shoes. Describe them in first-person terms like “I am struggling” as opposed to 3rd person e.g “Shade is a hard worker”.

Problems – Be very specific about what problems your persona faces. E.g lack of an automated system adds days to delivery of products.

Orientation – what is their professional demeanor? Look for things like “She has been in her career for 9 years and mentors her team” This tells you she is a leader who knows what she’s doing. Talk about how your solution will elevate her team’s skills.

Obstacles – state your persona’s relevant obstacles: things that get in the way at each stage, at each step, that keeps your persona from moving forward. .

Objective – Make the persona’s objective specific. E.g “to increase speed in delivery” is better than “to grow revenue” When you get specific, you make it easy to create content/service/products for your audience.Questions – You need to figure out what questions your persona would ask at every step along the way. Imagine your persona saying this to you: “Given my situation, why should I care? How do I eliminate X to achieve Y? What can I do now that I couldn’t do before?” Does your solution answer those questions?Preferences – What are their content preferences?

Channels: what channels do they prefer?Social Media: how do they use social media?What type of content do they consume more? Short/long articles, videos What communities are they a part of?

Engagement scenarios – Under what circumstances do they interact?

Knowing who your target audience is will help you determine what kind of content your should be putting out, how you should present it, what time and where. Otherwise, you’ll just be going through the same cycle of not knowing why your page isn’t growing or why your product/service isn’t selling.

You might have spent hours, days or weeks working on a great product/service that you know would solve a need but without the knowledge of who you should be reaching and selling to, you won’t get any results.

Know who your audience is and what makes them tick. That’s the only way you can connect with them.
Do you know your Target Audience? As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

https://www.anatech.com.ng/know-target-audience/