How to Effectively Tell the Story of the Target Customer?
Building personas for B2C and B2B businesses alike
Persona is an effective tool to align your entire organization on the target market. This alignment can drive more targeted content creation among team members. This alignment can ensure that products are developed with the buyer in mind. Personas can be shared via presentations. Personas can be printed and hung onto office walls. I’ve been in offices where life-size printouts are placed in the office to ensure that everyone “meets” their target on a daily basis.
What is a persona? A buyer persona exemplifies your target market. It defines your entire target market as if it was one person. You may even give this persona a name. This concrete definition allows you to align everyone in your organization toward the same target. A persona ties the commonalities within your target market and distills it into a single narrative.
A persona is an effective tool for B2C and B2B businesses alike.
At the end of the day, you’re providing a solution to a need. You’ll be helping to improve the life of someone. Business decisions are ultimately made by a person. In a B2B persona, you’ll have demographic attributes that include industry, company size, revenue, etc. But you’ll still be profiling a person. Instead of Jenny, a single mother who wants to make smart choices for her and her daughter’s future, your profile would be Jenny, an accountant for a mid-size company in the food service industry who is drowning in payroll reports.
All persona should answer the following basic questions, in order to be an effective tool:
- What drives this person to reach for a solution?
- What would this person consider as success?
- Why would this person be dissatisfied?
- What are the top considerations for this person in evaluating competing options?
- What is the path-to-purchase?
Below are example personas for a hypothetical click-to-print plugin for Instagram. Each persona tells a narrative of a specific market segment. In this hypothetical case, as well as in real-life, multiple personas will lead you in multiple directions. Unless you have the resources (and money) to tackle it all, prioritize and focus on one persona at a time. Identify the persona that you’re best positioned to reach and to connect. Focus your energy and resources into that particular target market first.
Are you ready to build a buyer persona for your business?
Student Testimonials:
Good intro course to designing personas and strategy. Resources and examples add the most value to the course. — Mi T.
I really enjoyed taking this course as I have received valuable insights regarding personas and how effective they can be in defining my target prospects. Great job Jeannie! — Bonnie D.
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