Developing buyer personas is important for many reasons, including crafting targeted messages and personalizing marketing activities. But, before focusing on messaging and marketing efforts, it is key to understand all the components that makeup buyer personas, especially the demographic information of your target audiences. Having a thorough understanding of their demographics can help guide your messaging and marketing efforts in the long term.
Significance of Demographic Data in Buyer Personas
Many factors go into creating buyer personas, such as psychographics, behavior, firmographics as well as demographics. Each factor is important. Buyer personas are developed to help depict and represent an organization’s ideal audience. While the number of personas an organization develops is decided by organizational leaders, it is important to keep in mind the size and goals of your company. Larger companies may develop more personas while smaller companies may outline a few to keep their target audience more focused. In this blog, we highlight a few different demographic data points and discuss how those play a part in crafting buyer personas.
Generational Differences
Age is a key demographic factor and component of buyer personas. Each generation holds different characteristics that influence how to reach them most effectively through marketing efforts. A person’s age can influence their buying power, values and shared characteristics with their peers. Oftentimes, those in a certain age range are put in different generational groups such as Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X or Baby Boomers. Determining which generation, they fall in can help reveal some common pain points, but these are not always absolute, so consider age as only part of the larger equation and your overall buyer persona as a whole.
Buyer Preferences and Gender
Another demographic data point that can be considered is gender identity. Different gender identities have different attitudes which can influence messaging and other marketing efforts. When building your buyer personas, look at how the gender identities in your ideal audience can use your product, solution or service in their work role or how it can impact their company overall.
Level of Education
Level of education can also be a demographic characteristic to factor in when building buyer personas. Education can give insight into the specializations of your target audience. If your target audience has many employees with master’s degrees or special certifications in certain areas, you will want to consider how they may react or consider advertisements.
Role/Job Title Within a Business
Take notice of what job titles and roles someone has in a company. This is a key demographic data point in a buyer persona. Not only do you have an understanding of what role they have within a business but knowing the roles of other individuals can uncover the organizational structure a business has and often areas where they may lack support. Overall, a role or job title is a critical component to include in buyer personas.
Location and Accessibility
The geographical location of a company is another demographic characteristic to look at. For example, if a company provides onsite services, then being in a convenient location matters and it would be more strategic to focus marketing efforts on audiences in locations near an office versus on audiences in a location several hours away. Ensure to note the geographical location for this reason when building out buyer personas.
Taking the time to carefully consider and gather demographic data points when crafting buyer personas can provide a greater ROI as your messaging and marketing activities will better align with the values and pain points of your customer.
Build Your Buyer Personas Today
Buyer personas are a critical component of companies, influential in marketing activities and help personalize your marketing efforts. It’s important to get them right the first time to ensure you are spending the time, money and resources for the right audiences using the right marketing efforts.
Ready to build, or reevaluate your buyer personas? Check out our Buyer Persona Development Course, filled with the complete, step-by-step process of how to find your target audience and build buyer personas that will drive more effective marketing and generate business results.
