Do You Know Your Buyer Persona - Kompass Media Blog

Over the past number of weeks, I have seen an increase in requests for LinkedIn Training and the question I keep getting asked is:

“How do I gain more exposure and convert connections into conversions?”

When I sit down with clients or students I find the first basic rule of LinkedIn is not done.

Yes, I am talking about Personas. Surely it is about building your profile on LinkedIn first and connecting with Like-Minded Business owners?

Well let's put it this way and simplify it for you. If you need to buy a pair of shoes, do you just go to the shops and pick up the first pair you can find?

You have idea in your head about the type of shoes you want to purchase, the style, the colour, the material (Leather /Suede etc), the size, will they be lace up or slip on?

Usually the answers to these questions would be YES, you know what you want to buy and most likely you have done some research before you purchase them.

So the same should apply when you are creating your LinkedIn Profile. Key Questions to answer.

In order to build the right profile and content, you need to know the type of connections you want to entice to view and connect with you on the platform. The best way to do this is to create personas of the ideal connections and potential customers you want to be associated with and connected to.

As with shoes, there can be variations in sizes and styles you may want to purchase, so having a number of different personas built is always a good idea. This is not just restricted to LinkedIn, you can use them and tweak them for the other platforms and Target Marketing as well.

The first port of call every Digital Marketing Agency or Social Media Manager will create is a persona of the target audience or client they want to attract and here are some simple guidelines you can follow to build your own personas of your connections and customers.

So Where Do We Start:

Here is a framework to build your persona of your ideal client. Each part of this process is very important to build a picture of your target audience.

Type of Persona:

We need to decide what type of persona we want to build, give it a title Business Man/Woman, Company Director, CEO, CMO, Consumer, Client.

**Photo of *Subject (Person/Persona):**

We are all very visual, it is the law of attraction and the brain recognises imagery faster than the written word. It also helps us to gain a better understanding of the person in a split second, we all know this but never really think of it.

Stop for a moment and think about when you walk by a shoe shop and look in the window your eyes will be drawn to the styles of shoe you like even though their maybe a number of different types in the window.

So the first part of building a persona should be adding a photo so we can automatically resonate with that person, it helps us get a better feel for the persona we are trying to build.

Create a backstory about the subject:

In order for us to attract the *subject and make it easier to market to them, we need to understand where they are in their life, what is there back story. There are a number of elements to this which we need to take into consideration.

The *Subjects Name

Marital Status

Age

Job Description

Salary

Hobbies and Interests

What their values are?

By building the profile of them we can gain insights on how we market to them and what touches the nerve with them. How can we humanise the product or services that they will pick up on and create more curiosity for them to investigate us more. Reference Example above.

Goals and Frustrations:

Next we should look at their goals and frustrations. Not with our products or services more so with their life, where do they want to go, what they want to achieve, what is hold them back. By building this into the persona, we can very quickly establish how we can solve these problems and help them to achieve their goals.

Data Metrics

We now need to look at the transactional and monthly outgoing the *subject has at their disposable. This will help us to create content based on their buying power. Understanding how tech savvy they are will assist us in knowing how easy or complex our message and marketing should be to the persona.

We also need to take into consideration the frequency of how they go out and spend on entertainment. What technology devices do they use i.e. Smartphones, Laptops, Desktops or Tablets. One of the main reasons for establishing this information lets us know how we should target our content and size of graphic, whether to fit Mobile or Desktop etc.

A key element of reaching the *subject is finding out where they spend their time on Social Media. This information can be drilled down into the information we have already build up about them.

Reach & Opportunities

After developing a bigger picture of the *subject, we can now start to analyse the data and best design a marketing plan with touch points that can help us reach out to the subject in their space. We can quickly identify their pains, monitory restraints, digital platforms and gain a deeper understanding about them.

Final Note:

I would encourage you to start building this framework of your ideal customers so you can market directly to them and create a marketing campaign that talks to them instead of everyone in that age bracket or general audience.

When you create your persona we can ease the pain of trying to understand their thoughts, actions and their buying power.

So get started today.