Using Your Buyer Persona to Guide Your Landing Page Design

Building a buyer persona is a key part of any online marketing strategy. If you put it together right, your buyer persona should guide every marketing decision you make.

Often, however, the buyer persona gets forgotten during the hustle and bustle of landing page design and optimization.

Sometimes, the page is rushed to completion without much thought for the buyer persona. Sometimes, the landing page designer never gets a copy of the buyer persona.

Regardless of the specific reason, a landing page designed without the buyer persona in mind simply isn’t as effective.

To help with this problem, let’s take a look at what a buyer persona is and how to use it effectively in your design and testing process.

What is a Buyer Persona?

Basically, a buyer persona is a profile of your target audience. It usually contains such items like your audience’s demographic, interests, pain points and what makes your offer a good fit for your audience.

Ideally, a good buyer persona will have insights on your buyer, such as their passed shopping patterns, industry buzzwords, and concerns and criteria.

As you might imagine, this sort of information is incredibly helpful for designing a landing page that meets the needs and expectations of your target audience.

Designing For Your Buyer Persona

Understanding who your buyer persona is makes designing your landing page a fairly straightforward process. Instead of taking a blind stab at what your audience will respond to, you can make highly educated guesses that set your landing page up for success.

For example, I recently designed a landing page for a mobile app that connects semi truck drivers directly to long haul job opportunities (think Uber, but for trucking).

Never having been a trucker myself, I didn’t know exactly what sort of landing page would make sense for this audience. I had a few guesses, but I wasn’t sure how best to design the page.

However, before I had a chance to burn too much time or energy on guesswork, we were handed a very detailed buyer persona from our contact at the company.

The level of detail in the PDF blew me away.

The buyer persona had so much information that I found it fascinating. I started reading about their age, political party affiliation, weight, religion, interests, dislikes, passed history, education, income, etc…it was awesome!

With all of that detail in hand, building the landing page was breeze. I knew who I was trying to reach and what their primary pain point was. That made it easy to pick a landing page design, imagery and copy that hit their pain point and offered them a solution.

Use Your Buyer Persona to Develop Your Testing Strategy

In addition to using your buyer persona during your initial landing page design, your buyer persona can be a great way to come up with A/B testing ideas.

The better you understand your audience, the easier it is to guess at why particular page elements, images or copy produce a specific response.

If you have a good buyer persona in hand, you can quickly come up with specific tests that will teach a lot about how your buyer persona interacts with your landing page.

For example, some buyer personas respond well to positive emotion. Other respond better to negative emotion.

Sometimes, it can be hard to predict which buyer personas will respond best to which emotion. However, if you understand your audience’s pain point, you can easily create an A/B split test for landing pages that target each emotion and see which emotion elicits a better response.

Conclusion

Landing page design and testing is a bit like running a restaurant. You can either be McDonald’s and try to cater the same thing to everyone…or you can have a waiter who tells you exactly what your customers want and how they want it prepared.

A good buyer persona is like your waiter. It tells you what your audience wants and sets you up for success in your design and testing efforts.

The more information you have to begin with, the better your design will be at every stage of the marketing process!

By the way, if you’d like me to look at your buyer persona(s) and give you some tips on how to incorporate your persona into your design and testing efforts, let me know here or in the comments!

How do you use your buyer persona to improve your landing page experience? Do you design and test with your buyer persona in mind?