How to build buyer personas for your ecommerce business

These days in the retail world, brands have more data and insights at their disposal than ever before, which means a greater opportunity to connect with and target the right people for your business. To ensure your content and communications with prospects and customers is relevant and engaging, you need to know who your key buyer personas are and look to understand their needs.

In this blog, we discuss the importance of buyer personas and outline how to build effective personas for your ecommerce business.

What are buyer personas?

Buyer personas are essentially your ideal customers. When businesses are conceived, it’s usually down to a gap in the market and an identifiable need or desire from consumers or individuals for certain services or products. Your business exists to feed that need or desire, or fill a gap in the market for something new, better or useful. Your buyer personas are the ideal customers for this proposition. 

Obviously, buyer personas are crucial to new businesses, but it’s also important for existing organisations to regularly assess their target audience as the digital landscape and consumer behaviours change very quickly, so you must ensure you’re still targeting the right people. Scoping out or reassessing your brand’s buyer personas is a proactive process that keeps you focused on what your audience and customers want.

How do I create buyer personas?

Creating buyer personas is not just about pinpointing your target audience and deciding who your perceived customers are, it’s about flipping your focus around to the customer and putting their needs first. Focus on the “why” behind your business and how your products and services solve a problem or meet a need or requirement for consumers.

You’ll need to delve into your data, conduct research with your existing customers and also set up workshops to help you put together your personas and flesh them out with profile information, details of persona goals, challenges and pain points.  This will enable your buyer personas to come to life, so you can effectively target them with content and communications.

Find your persona challenges and pain points

The key is the get all the relevant people in your business and your key stakeholders together to outline your personas’ key goals, challenges and pain points. Finding you customer pain points is crucial, as not only will this solve any existing issues you have with your current products, customer experience and customer service, but it will focus your strategy on how you solve your personas’ problems.

The process will refresh your brand’s priorities, putting aside your business goals, so you can see clearly what your customers want from your brand, whilst reminding yourselves of the reason your business was conceived in the first place!

How do you find your persona pain points? The collaborative sessions you have with all the key departments across your business and the research conducted with existing customers will reveal your persona pain points and key challenges.

Combine this work with your the insights gained from customer buying behaviours and engagement with your marketing communications. You’ll be perfectly placed to target your personas and ease their pain points, whilst it will enhance your ability to deliver effective personalisation and tailored content for your customers.

Understand how your business can serve your customer needs

Delivering relevant content through at the right times throughout the route to purchase and the customer lifecycle, helps to retain customers for longer and ensure the future success of your business. Using the information detailed in your persona profiles will help you to optimise your campaigns and even spark a change in approach and strategy that could really create a big impact for your brand’s performance.

Creating buyer personas does not just serve your marketing content, but enables you to optimise all areas of your ecommerce website, such as improving UX on your product pages or converting more customers in your online customer checkout process.

Summary

We hope this blog has demonstrated the importance buyer personas for keeping your business agile and helping you to deliver relevant content to your audience and existing customers. The results of your buyer persona work may require you to pivot your ecommerce strategy, but your brand should always look to evolve and meet changing consumer expectations and behaviours.

Are you a Head of Ecommerce or Ecommerce Manager looking to develop and improve your brand’s performance this year? Head over to our Ultimate Ecommerce Strategy Toolkit and delve into a treasure trove of expert tips, tactics and guides. Or why not download our Head of Ecommerce Checklist, which outlines key processes and recommendations to help you hit the ground running in your role!

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Space 48 is a leading UK ecommerce consultancy and website development agency, based in Manchester. Our highly-experienced ecommerce experts help retail brands to create award-winning ecommerce websites and effective omnichannel strategies. Why not get in touch today