502: How To Use Buyer Personas To Improve Your Messaging

In today’s episode of Not For Lazy Marketers, I’m diving into the importance of defining your buyer personas and how it can benefit your business. 

Tune in as I break down figuring out your buyer persona step by step, how to create content that resonates with your audience, the key to using buyer personas to drive conversions, and more! 

If you haven’t taken the time to define your buyer persona, you’re going to want to listen in…this is a must for your business, it’s not something optional. 

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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh:

In marketing, whenever you make decisions, I think it’s really important to understand the why. So I told this person, I said, if you were to say, no, I will not work with people who have X, Y, Z problem, is that going to benefit your messaging and your business? Is that gonna allow you to attract more people or are you just doing it because you’re trying to niche down? 

You are listening to the Not For Lazy Marketers Podcast, episode number 502.

Hello everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I hope you guys are having an amazing start to your week. I’m on this two week vacation kind of schedule. Like I planned this and then didn’t realize how close together they were. So last week I went on my own to Aspen, Colorado. I have some really good friends who have a timeshare there at the Ritz Carlton and they were like, we can’t use it. Do you want it? And I was like, yes, I will make it happen and I will be there. And so I got to end this snowboarding season, which is one of my favorite things in the world at the Ritz Carlton in Aspen by myself. And it was just really amazing. It was a really amazing trip. A lot of time to just think and reflect. I did two full days snowboarding.

I worked some, I walked one day like for two or three hours with no phone, and I just like walked with no purpose but to just be. And it was amazing. And so then I came home for one day. It’s Easter. It was Easter. And we also had this, this trip planned. I’m taking my kids on a surprise trip to San Diego to go to Lego Land in the zoo and we’re timing it with remodeling their bedrooms. And so I literally came home and that day we had Easter, we did like Easter morning, all the things. And then we had to take everything out of their bedrooms, like their closet, everything. And it took like five hours. So now we are leaving to San Diego and it’s a different type of a trip with the kids and I’m super excited. They don’t know where we’re going or what we’re doing.

And I have some surprises planned. My mom’s gonna come meet us there. And so it’ll be really fun. So today’s episode I had planned out because I was inspired from all of the business owners who are going through Launcher Funnel live right now. So Launcher Funnel Live started last week and the first week was around messaging. And so everybody in the experience was focused on their messaging, was focused on their offer positioning. And part of that work was getting a really clear definition of who their ideal customer avatar is. So one of the things that came out of the exercises that I had them go through was the concept of buyer personas. And I wanna share that here because for a lot of people it was a really big takeaway in the experience. And so this is something I teach in my process of defining an ideal customer.

And I will say my process of defining an ideal customer is really good <laugh>. Like most people think that they have a definition of who their ideal customer avatar is. And then they go through my process and they’re like, oh, I, I’m barely skimming the surface. And so people who did that last week were like, one person was like, oh my gosh, this was like going to Harvard, like for marketing. It was so good. And so the end of my process in doing that is buyer personas. And so a buyer persona is an individual group within your ideal customer that has the same core problem and core desires as your ideal customer, but they’re maybe at a different stage. So that could be a different stage of business than another buyer persona. That could be that they are like, an example in the group was a mom at a different phase.

Like she has one kid versus two kids, or she’s a first time mom versus a second time or third time mom. And so they’re at kind of different levels, but they have this, the key is that they have the same core desire and core dream come true. And so that has to be true because then your messaging is gonna all line up in your marketing. But by defining a two to three max, you should not have like 10 buyer personas. Most of you will just have two. Some of you may have three. And it’s always like a different level. A different phase is different stage that someone’s at. And by being able to get specific within that, you’re able to get a little bit more specific within your messaging. So that is the concept of a buyer persona. And what you can do is, and we’re, I’m gonna talk about this in depth, but the reason why this is really beneficial to do is now when you go write copy, when you go to, when you define this first and then you go write copy, you are able to decide which buyer persona you’re writing this for or maybe for both, and then get your messaging really specific from there.

So that’s the concept of a buyer persona. The really important piece of it is that the overarching similarities are gonna still define your ica, your ideal customer avatar. So you could, this is where like people will really mess up, is if you have people who have completely different frustrations and problems, then you won’t be able to speak to them directly enough. You they have to have the same overarching frustrations, problems, desires, and then they can have specifics that are different. But if you have, like one of the other pieces of this exercise that I have people do is write their dream crumb true customer avatar statement and then their frustration statement. And it’s one sentence and it’s like how to describe the number one thing, like problem you solve as a business and then how to describe the desire, the ultimate dream come true that your ideal customer wants to achieve in one sentence.

And so that has to be true for all the buyer personas. If that’s different, that’s where you’re gonna get into like having a different business because you’re talking to completely different PE people. So problems, dreams, desires, all have to have some similarity. And that is your ultimate like one sentence statements. Okay? And then the second piece is always understand why you are either getting specific or not when you, when you get into messaging. So this is something that came up last week is people were saying like, well, can I have this type of a person included in my ideal, ideal customer avatar? Or should I exclude them? Like if they don’t have this problem, then they’re not in my ideal customer avatar. Cause I’m trying to niche down. And so in marketing, whenever you make decisions, I think it’s really important to understand the why because so I told this person, I said, if you were to say no, I will not work with people who have x, y, Z problem, is that going to benefit your messaging and your business?

Is that gonna allow you to attract more people or are you just doing it because you’re trying to niche down? And ultimately it was just going to be for her to niche down. It wasn’t going to be to actually help her attract more people. And so if you’re trying to get specific or not and say, I’m including this group of people, or I’m not including this group of people in my messaging, understand why. So for example, for me, we don’t, we don’t work with brick and mortar businesses. So my content is about digital marketing, it is about ads for e-commerce service, digital products. It’s always digital marketing. And so that is strategic because number one, I don’t sell my offer to those people, but I also intentionally choose not to sell my offer to those people because I would have to change so much of the way that I spoke that it would water down my other messages and my other content because I would be trying to include everybody.

And so if you find yourself when you’re creating content or you’re writing copy or you are, you know, creating your Optum page or your emails and you’re trying to include everybody and it’s watering down your message, that is where you’re potentially not getting specific enough. Now, there’s ways to get specific in a single sentence in your messaging, and this is what I told them. For example, I will frequently say, if you’ve never run ads or you’ve run ads before and they didn’t really convert, or you’re running ads and you wanna take them to the next level, that’s three different people that I just included in one sentence. And I’m not watering down my message, but I’m making people understand, okay they, you know, are they see themselves in my, in my copy. So understand why you’re either getting specific or not and is the benefit so that it’s not gonna water down your messaging if you are not specific or are you just doing it because you think you have to.

Okay? So then the next thing I wanna talk about is that once you have these personas defined, it can actually really help you with content or creating categories on, on ways that you talk. So this, i I said to somebody last week was, once you have these buyer personas defined, then you can go when you make your social media for example, and say, okay, I want, you know, 30% talking to this buyer persona, 30% to this buyer persona, and then maybe 30%, that’s gonna encompass both of them. And so once you have the specifics, you’re able to create content because likely these people will have specific, very specific problems. So for example, for me, I have two buyer personas. I have the people who are right for, well, I guess I could have three because I have the people who are right for Elite, our middle tier agency package.

I have the people who are right for profit, which is our highest level agency package. And then I, I really have the people, the business owners who are better for things like Launcher Funnel live, my digital products, they’re not ready for the agency yet. So when I create content, I can create content for all three of those people and then I also can create overarching content that all of them are going to register with. But sometimes I might create a specific piece of content that is for somebody who has never run ads before and I know and I’m doing that on purpose. Or here’s a, a really good example. We just did our big launch for Launcher Funnel Live and we are very clear on that buyer persona, which is a different person than the agency buyer persona. So we are very clear on that, which allowed us to get very clear with our emails, with our ad copy, with all of our messaging cuz we are deep and clear on that buyer persona.

But it doesn’t change that my ideal customer still wants successful marketing and a successful marketing strategy. Okay? And then the final point that I have on all of this is that people, when they see your messaging, your ideal customer, when they see your, your copy, your ads, your social, they need to see themselves in what you’re saying to be able to trust you. And so you want the experience that people to have of, oh man, she really gets me like she is taking the words from my mouth. She understands me so well, how is she doing that? And the way that you get that, that experience to happen is by being so specific with frustrations, with desires, with pain, and even specific scenarios so that they see themselves in what you’re saying and they believe 100% in the fact that you’re gonna help them solve their problem.

And so you can only get that specific by getting that specific in your, who your ideal customer is and what their problems are and what their frustrations are in all of those points. And so if you haven’t taken the time to get this specific and really think, do you have buyer personas? Maybe you have two. Again, you do not want too many because you don’t wanna water down your overall messaging, but it allows you to say, okay, you know, this is who this is, this is who I’m talking to in this moment. If you have more than one product that you sell or service that you sell or like a level of your service, you absolutely have different buyer personas because that wouldn’t make sense that you wouldn’t have people who had a little bit different variation of problems and desires than somebody else who wanted the different product.

And so in almost all cases, if you have multiple offers, which you again shouldn’t have too many, but if you have levels to your offers or the example of the business owner with moms, she was selling a product, product-based business that was meant for moms at different places. And so if you have that, you have buyer personas and you don’t wanna have too many of those, but you wanna be clear who they are so that when you talk about that offer or you create a strategy to sell that offer or you’re creating content, you are able to get specific for who that is. All right, everybody, I hope you found this as helpful as the group Inside Launcher Funnel Live did. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast. I’ll talk to you guys on Thursday.

Thanks for listening to the Not for Lazy Marketers Podcast. If you love this episode and want deeper support with your marketing, head over to helpmystrategy.com to see how Hirsh Marketing can help take your marketing to the next level. No matter where you’re at today, we help our clients scale faster than ever, find hidden leaks in their funnel, experiment with new creative marketing strategies, and help their business explode and be more profitable than they ever dreamed possible. Head over to helpmystrategy.com and see if you qualify for a free strategy audit with Team Hirsh.