Creating Your Buyer Persona
When you first start building leads, the first and most important thing you need to do is to identify your buyer persona. This is what will allow you to find your ‘cold leads’, which are the first point of contact for your marketing.
A cold lead is someone who has never heard from you before but who you have the option of contacting. This might be an email address you’ve bought, or someone who has just now landed on your site. What makes them a lead at all, is the fact that they fit your demographic. This is the kind of person that is likely to want to buy your product and they fit precisely within your target demographic.
If you can find that kind of person, that then means that you stand a much better chance of converting them from a cold lead to a warm lead – of getting them to give you permission to contact them.
But you can’t know if someone fits into your target demographic until you know precisely what that target demographic is. And this is where your ‘buyer persona’ comes into play.
What is a Persona?
Essentially, a persona is a profile of the kind of person who precisely matches your target demographic. That means they should be the right age and the right sex. They should have the right income and they should have hobbies/interests or a career that aligns with what you’re selling.
This is then what will allow you to target your ads to acquire those cold leads. You do this with PPC advertising, or by advertising in the right social media groups.
A persona goes further than this though and actually means that you are literally profiling your leads as though they were a real person. You need to think about their interests, their hobbies and even their dreams.
Once you know what the dream of your persona is, you can then start marketing to them much better by thinking about your value proposition. How are you going to make life better for that person? What problems that they deal with regularly are you going to solve for them?
Your persona will also tell you where you can find your readers. What other interests do they have for instance? You know they like your niche but perhaps they are also likely to enjoy cooking? In which case, what other opportunities does this open up? 
Knowing your persona will even help you to create posts that are much more engaging because they speak directly to the kind of reader who is likely to be looking at them!
