Public Relations Strategies | Creating a Buyer Persona
Creating an effective and successful PR plan requires an in-depth definition of your target audience. That can be rather difficult if you lack a great understanding of your target audience. A way to help alleviate that difficulty and to make it easier to cater to your target audience is to create a buyer persona for each customer/buyer that can be found in your target audience.
Though marketers and PR professionals have been using buyer personas for years, David Meerman Scott’s New Rules of Marketing and PR explains it well and helps readers to grasp the concept. In an undergrad class I was taking, we were asked to create buyer personas in groups so that we could create better campaigns for a company of our choice. My group and I made a few buyer personas so that we would better understand how to market to Toyota’s buyers. That was a valuable component to our overall strategy of creating marketing and PR tactics to reach our target audience.
Scott writes,
Smart marketers understand buyers, and many build formal ‘buyer personas’ for their target demographics… [I]f we break the buyers into distinct groups and then catalog everything we know about each one, we make it easier to create content targeted to each important demographic. (New Rules of Marketing and PR, pg. 32.)
Whether you plan to market to them or to target them in your PR tactics, knowing who ‘they’ are is a vital part to getting that right. Scott continues on to say that “[u]nderstanding buyers and building an effective content strategy to reach each of them is critical for success.” (pg. 33)
Creating those buyer personas helped us to create more targeted activities and commercials that would make more of an impact and speak to the needs of those personas. For example, part of our new campaign was to be present at music festivals and to have contests (including one giveaway of a Prius). We were able to create that contest idea by first creating a buyer persona that had the characteristics of someone who cared about the environment, attended these festivals, and were finally earning enough income to purchase a new vehicle.
Say for example you are an online community looking to gain more members. First, define who your target market is. MyWorkButterfly, who aim to help mothers in the workplace, have a few target audiences. They can include the mother to be who is still working and getting ready to take a maternity leave, the mother who wants to return to work, and the mother who is already returned to work after having a child (or children). What MyWorkButterfly could do then is to create three personas that include as much detail about each of these buyers as possible. Each buyer persona will include different points of information which will in turn warrant different strategies to cater to each of their needs.
Scott features some commentary from someone who has been using these buyer personas for more than 20 years. Adele Revella (who has an entire blog dedicated to buyer personas) relays to him:
A buyer persona profile is a short biography of the typical customer, not just a job description but a person description. The buyer persona profile gives you the change to truly empathize with target buyers, to step out of your role as someone who wants to promote a product and see, through your buyers’ eyes, the circumstances that drive their decision process. The buyer persona profile includes information on the typical buyer’s background, daily activities, and current solutions for their problems. (pg. 119-120)
In essence, these buyer personas are a way to give a face to the customers who visit your site, who buy your products, and who generate WOM (word-of-mouth) for your company. Give the buyer personas names, going so far as to even give them a picture of what you think they look like. This can help to make the marketing and PR process more personal and more tailored to the people who are looking to you for a new or better solution to the problems they are currently experiencing.
For MyWorkButterfly, to target their buyer personas and to make them feel welcome on the site, they could have three different sections that target each one directly. There could also be places on the website that cater to all three audiences that talk about postnatal health and mental health, for example. The point of creating the three different spaces on the website is so that each persona feels acknowledged and better understood.
In PR, knowing who to target in terms of publications, your website, and the media is critical to your success. Like advertising, you must know who you are targeting before you can have any measure of successful communication. Moreover, make an effort to get your buyer personas involved in the communication process. Know how they like to communicate and get them acting. This also requires that your calls to action are clear, links are present, and that you make benefits of doing such actions apparent.
Have you created a buyer persona in your PR or marketing efforts? Has that helped you in your communication goals? Click on the title of this post and start the conversation!
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Tags: Buyer Personas, Creating a Buyer Persona, Public Relations Strategies, Strategic PR Plans
