Have you ever heard a business reference a wacky-sounding character name, like “Enterprise Emily” or “Small-Business Sandra,” for example? If so, you’ve probably happened upon the concept of a buyer persona. Despite their often larger-than-life names, buyer personas actually contain a wealth of information that can guide your marketing efforts, including your video content. Keep reading for our top five tips on using buyer personas to tailor your video content.
What Is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a fictional character that a brand uses to represent a customer segment, website user, or other category of consumer that will interact with the brand. Brand personas typically take into account demographic information, behavior patterns, likes and dislikes, motivations, lifestyles, and any other information that might differentiate one type of consumer from another. Most businesses will have multiple buyer personas, each representing a different segment of the target audience.
To capitalize on the human element of these complex characters, buyer personas are often given real names and preferences that align with what their segment represents. For example, a buyer persona for a calendar app might be “Working Mom Wendy” or “Business Owner Bob.”
We’ll use Working Mom Wendy as an example of the types of information that typically fall into buyer personas.
Working Mom Wendy is between the ages of 40 and 55. She has two or more kids and is in a management position in her career. She enjoys fitness, is meticulously organized, and has a close circle of longtime friends. Wendy is at her best when she is busy and prides herself on keeping a clean and organized home and juggling many responsibilities at once.
Why Are Buyer Personas Useful?
Buyer personas help put into perspective the data that brands have on their customer bases. With the calendar app example, it would be one thing to know that you’re targeting working women with children, but it adds another dimension to flesh out all of the details about Wendy’s life and her priorities. Then, when the brand needs to make a decision about how to target the audience that Wendy represents, employees can imagine Wendy herself and how she would react to different marketing tactics.
How to Tailor Videos to Your Buyer Personas
So, what does this mean for your video content? As with any marketing content, your buyer personas can help to ensure that your message is resonating with your intended audience and generating the maximum impact. Here are five ways you can tailor your video content to your buyer personas.
1. Make multiple videos to segment your messaging
As we mentioned earlier, most businesses will have several buyer personas with different needs and motivations. It’s unlikely that any one video will address all of the points that each buyer persons needs to hear, so consider making multiple videos to segment your messaging. You may need one video for each buyer persona, or maybe the core concept will overlap for a few of your buyer personas, but not all of them. We recommend brainstorming your video content, and then going through each of your buyer personas one at a time to decide whether the video will resonate or not. If not, consider making another video for the persona that will be alienated, or at least tailor your distribution so that you aren’t wasting resources trying to reach an audience that won’t get the maximum benefit from the video.
2. Match the tone
Another great piece of information that buyer personas can hint at is the tone of your messaging. Do your audiences want overly formal language, or do they want something more conversational? Is slang okay, or should you use industry jargon? Are emojis going to add to your message, or are they a waste of time? These questions will probably depend on factors like age, digital habits, and whether consumers are in your company’s industry or not. Thankfully, your buyer personas will reflect these pieces of information, so you should have a pretty good idea of what tone would be appropriate if you spend some time thinking about these audiences. Then, make sure your video reflects this tone!
3. Answer the right questions
Your buyer personas also reflect the types of questions that prospective customers might have about your product or service. For example, Working Mom Wendy might want to know if our fictional calendar app could sync with her kids or her employees for easy sharing. If we were making a video targeting users like Working Mom Wendy, that’s a question we would definitely want to anticipate and cover in our video content. These questions will likely be different for each buyer persona, so again, you can see the benefit of potentially having more than one video to segment the messaging.
4. Consider video length
Video length is easily overlooked when it comes to buyer personas, but it’s another factor that can really differ among your audiences. For example, if you’re targeting executives who are making buying decisions on behalf of their entire companies, you might want a longer video than if you were targeting an individual end-user. In general, the more information your buyer persona will need in order to make a decision about purchasing, the longer your video should be in an effort to provide that information.
5. Adjust distribution
Finally, adjust your distribution according to where your buyer personas are likely to interact with your video. If Working Mom Wendy spends her time on Facebook but has never used Twitter or Instagram, you probably want to focus your efforts on Facebook distribution. Thinking through where your buyer personas spend time (both online and offline) will save you from wasting resources to promote your content where it won’t be seen, and will allow you to double down on the locations with the highest impact.
Conclusion
There’s a reason buyer personas have taken over the world of marketing in recent years, and it’s because they contain priceless information about how your audiences are likely to react to your choices. It’s safe to say that most businesses, including yours, would benefit from building a habit around considering buyer personas each time a marketing approach comes into question. Your marketing content—including video—will be more impactful as a result.
