7 Basic Categories To Build Your International Buyer Personas

The important thing to remember about personas. Personas is a detail list of answered information that goes beyond the traditional demographics (sex, age, occupation, etc), geographic segmentation (location by city, state, and country), and psychographics (personality, values, attitudes, interest, and lifestyles, etc).

Personas focus a lot on the motives behind behaviors. What this means is that it is not about paying attention to what customers–or potential customers– are doing, but why they are doing in order to understand their needs, so you can fulfill those needs with your product or services.

There are three steps to build and create your buyer persona

a)   Identify what questions you want to ask in order to develop your buyer persona.

b)   Determine what methods or channels you will utilize to find and research your personas.

c)   Perfect you draft of notes and questions into tailor and focus to build your complete persona.

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How to identify  a buyer persona

There is no one format fits all. You make your own list with questions you want to know about your ideal customer (buyer persona) based on the goal of your marketing campaign or business.Oppose to your traditional psychographics (personality, attitudes, interest and lifestyles), a Buyer Personas is a set of questions you ask about what you want to know about your ideal customers or vice verse, what you want to know about your current customers.

Because Buyer Personas is such of a new concept, it can be confusing of what exactly personas mean and what is format.

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Using basic seven categories to build a Persona Profile

Information about: Role, company/organization, goals, challenges, watering holes (extra missing info), personal background, and shopping preferences.

international-buyer-persona-check-list

Seven categories for Building Your International Buyer Personas

Keep in mind that this is just a basic structure in that a buyer persona is a constant process of updating and adding or subtracting new questions till you get the best fit. Think of to the similar process you do when you run paid campaigns on Googles’ Adwords: you created several ads and several landing pages, and many sets of keywords in the hopes that the combined effort–of all those steps– will yield higher conversion rates.

Think of if as the similar process you do when you run paid campaigns on Google or other outlets: you created several ads and several landing pages, and many sets of keywords hoping that the convened effort–of all those steps– will yield higher conversion rates.

The same is with Personas, keep finding more about what you need to know, and so much just getting tons of random generic information about your ideal buyer persona. The key is to stay focus and be clear about your organizational strategic goal, or ad campaign goal(s).

Ask yourself what would you like to know about that ideal buyer or customer.

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International Buyer Persona Funnel:

1. Attack the right consumers or users.
HOW: With your tipical SEO, relevant keywords, blog post, and social media– including video.

2. Convert those visitors into leads.
HOW: With call-to-action, forms, signups, relevant landing pages.
Note: generate leads that can convert into the action you want (buy, register, call etc)-

3. Closing the deal
HOW: Use tools:  Email tracking tags, Workflows, Use Google analytics (free tool)

4. Keep them happy and turn them into a returning contumer/consumer
HOW: Keep a Buyer Persona satisfied by constantly creating surveys and monitoring social interactions to understand them better and use rewards, VIP memberships, and special offerts.

 

Make your buyer persona questions to be market specific

The questions you ask and gather should not be too broad. Think what a typical day in the life of your ideal customer looks like within that market (apparel, automobile, real estate, etc).

You can start with generic questions when you begin to build your personas– by using the table above– but you can feel free to add, modify or subtract these questions as much as you needed to match your industry and lingo.

In other words, your persona optimization process should become very specific and with a biased view of what you persona looks like with tailor questions to your organization or industry. Keeping your questions market specific will help you better understand your persona.

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Example of persona building questions tailored specific to your industry

You will ask this question to your customer. An ideal way is to ask your customers directly (via twitter surveys, sweepstakes, focus groups), but if this can be pricey for small business. Another method is by gathering intelligence data through your email database, surveys, online chats, social medias, forms, etc.

GENERIC QUESTIONS:

  • What is your role when your family buys products?
  • Where do you go for information about a product or service you are interested in?
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TAILORED QUESTION:
Using an example for a travel agency businses

  • What is your role in life? (Are you a parent? Grandparent?).
  • What does a day in your life look like? (What time you get up, do you go to work? stay home?).
  • How often do you plan a vacation and how do you do it? (do you use the internet, do you read travel publications?).
  • How do you research an expensive purchase (are you early adapter or Late Majority or Laggards?)
  • What do you look for a vacation? (relax and escape? Or excitement and entertainment?).

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Ways to research your personas

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Data-driven Marketing

We now work in a world where data answers the questions that as a business or startup you wish you knew to ask. With advanced in analytics, data no longer just informs — it predicts. So you can instantly turn predictions into facts and build your personas from there.

While marketing insights began in web analytics, you can now get a 360-degree view of individual customers based on insights extrapolated from both on- and offline. Customer-driven data helps you understand individual journeys in their entirety, so you can act on them by delivering experiences that perfectly fit with individual needs and preferences. The cloud tools such as Omniture is used to gather this information, and marketers are now using system solutions that can learn, adjust and act based on evolving behaviors in order to satisfy and recognized their Buyer Personas.

To research your personas begin with the following:

  • Use adobe Marking cloud and learn SiteCatalyst interface, Part 1
  • Search for your industry keywords on various social networks
  • Check out comments section on key industry blogs, review potential personas on their linked in profiles
  • Ask questions on social media about your product or service
  • Interview current customers
  • If you do not have customers to ask yet, you can try finding out your competitors personas– or use an educated assumption of what your personas are, and growth from there as you gather customer data.

Important: As you collect the data make sure you centralized it on one dashboard or CRM system in order to be able to see trends and the whole picture.

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International SEO Tools to gathering consumer data for your personas

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Choosing a primary persona

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Once you extrapolate and compile your data in one dashboard, then answer the questions you prepared, and use that to build a primary persona. You primary persona usually is the one that brings the more revenue to your business.  Make sure you don’t just create a list of things but tell the story about your persona. To create a visual representation, don’t use a photo of one of your customers, but instead use a stock image of someone that generally represents your primary persona.

Below it is an sample of how a finished Primary Persona Story looks like.International_seo_buyer_persona_smaple

This primary persona was pulled from the questions you created. As you can see, instead of having a bullet point list of questions answered, a story was created.  Having just a list of questions answered that looks like a fact sheet, it is not a Persona. Instead, this list was used to create a story.

How to create a story if you are not a professional writer?

To write your buyer persona story use these five points of development:

  • Job and demographic information
  • Talk about what a day in the life of your primary buyers look like
  • What are they challenges and points
  • Where do they go for information (social media, magazines?)
  • What are things they (buyer persona) don’t like about products and services, and what would she like it to be instead?

When writing your international buyer persona story, try keeping informative but shore. It doesn’t need to be an essay, think of it as a making a personal introduction about someone you know really well. The point of this is to make your Buyer Persona seem more realistic.

And remember, every content or every effort you make should have a buyer persona ready.  Everything you do with your international marketing strategy and through the Buyer Journey Funnel should tide up with the personas you created for the country and region you are targeting.

Marketing Implementation

To learn how to integrate and associate your buyer persona to buyer journeys read: Mapping the Buyer Journeys Associated With Each of Your Organization’s Personas

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5 thoughts on “7 Basic Categories To Build Your International Buyer Personas

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  • “Really appreciate you sharing this article post. I didnt know about Personas. Much thanks again. Really Cool.”

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