In 2021, there were 2.14 billion buyers, and your e-commerce company probably could be the one catering to a majority of the chunk. However, just because you can sell to these buyers doesn’t mean you should.
One crucial reason is that modern-day buyers expect personalized purchase experiences tailored to their specific needs and pain points. Another is that if you use a one-size-fits-all approach to marketing and sales, your message gets diluted. Consequently, buyers don’t feel connected to your brand, which ultimately impacts its value and adversely affects your sales and profits.
To avoid these issues, it’s crucial to ensure that your offerings and marketing messages resonate with specific buyers in the ways that matter to them. In other words, you must target specific buyers. But first, you need to understand who these buyers are. Here’s where creating buyer personas come in.
In this brief blog, we show you how you can create buyer personas in order to identify the right buyers for your e-commerce firm.
What is a Buyer Persona in E-Commerce?
A buyer persona is a detailed profile of your “ideal” customer, i.e. the customer who is most likely to buy and/or use your e-commerce product or service. It includes customers’ demographic data such as their age, location, gender, their pain points, and needs that guide their purchase decisions. Creating a buyer persona will help you target specific customer segments on their preferred messaging channels and speak directly to their needs with personalized content and tailored marketing messages. You can show these prospects how your products can help meet their specific needs. Over time, these personas can improve your e-commerce brand’s engagement and increase conversions and sales.
As you are not catering to only one type of customer, it’s natural that you will create more than one buyer persona. However, it’s best to limit yourself to 3-5 personas at the most to manage your marketing messages and sales strategies effectively.
So how can you identify your ideal customer by creating buyer personas for your e-commerce brand? The rest of this article explores some strategies to get you started!
Conduct Research on Current Customers
Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations or “archetypes” of your core customers. However, they are always based on real data. One of the best ways to create accurate buyer personas for your e-commerce brand is to look at your current customers and understand what they’re looking for and why. You can get this information from your sales team or by talking directly to these customers via interviews or surveys.
In addition to existing customers, you can also conduct research on prospects, leads, and other users who may be similar to your target audience. Gather information about these potential buyers and their pain points and motivations, and use these data points to create and inform your consumer personas.
Gather Demographic Information
Demographics refers to information about a buyer’s – or a group of buyers’ – location, age, gender, education, job title, income, and the likes. These information pieces serve as crucial inputs for your persona-creation exercise, particularly if your e-commerce store sells products based on demographics.
These attributes provide the objective information you need, to figure out the needs, wants, and interests of your targeted audience segments. Through this you can create specific consumer personas and design tailored marketing strategies that appeal to these personas. For example, does your store specialize in anti-dandruff shampoo for women?
How about dog toys for single-parent homes in New York City?
Demographics will help you identify these buyer segments and create more effective marketing campaigns that “talk” to these segments.
Understand the Psychology of Your Target Audience
Like demographic data, psychographic data can help you create buyer personas. Purchase goals, pain points, habits, attitudes, and values of your target audience – are some of the examples of psychographic data. These information pieces can help you clarify how your e-commerce products help buyers achieve their goals or resolve their problems. You can better understand the psychological aspects driving purchase decisions, and create messaging that shows them how your offerings resonate with their interests or hobbies.
By grasping the psychology of the target audience, brands can communicate effective value propositions to increase conversions, boost sales, and lead to repeat purchases, referrals, and positive reviews. This will ultimately enhance the purchase experience.
Organize, Analyze, and Apply Audience Information
Once you’ve collected all the demographic and psychographic information about your target audience, analyze it and then apply it to create buyer personas. Look for common themes, patterns, and the most frequently repeated preferences and pain points.
Do people in a particular location have the same preferences?
Or do people of similar ages have similar values and needs?
Organizing this information and identifying patterns will help you understand the audience better, create relevant buyer personas for your e-commerce brand, and accordingly shape your marketing efforts to create value for them – and for you.
Conclusion
The concept of buyer persona is a tough nut to crack. Today, almost every firm spend billions in research just to get that “one” consumer right! However, all the data gathering, analyzing, and forming it into a long term strategy (buyer persona), requires an in-depth understanding of the market and consumer behavior. So far, aggregators have seemed to have gained expertise in this field.
By creating buyer personas, Ergode and other top brand aggregators identify the relevant buyer and consumer for your e-commerce brand. After identifying, it creates focused marketing strategies to appeal to these buyers and increase the chances of your products being chosen over your competitors.
