Get to Know Your Customers: 5 Reasons to Create Buyer Personas
When you write a new piece of content, who do you picture as the reader? When you help your business development rep script a new phone pitch, can you picture the person on the other end of the phone?
If the image in your head is grainy and out of focus, it’s time to develop target buyer personas for your company.
Buyer personas, or generalized representations of your ideal customers, help you understand your prospective and existing customers better. Knowing the specifics of your target audience enables you to attract your most-wanted prospects and customers. We’re talking the prospects that will convert at the highest rate, benefit most from your product or service and become the most profitable customers for your business.
You can tailor marketing content and channels, sales pitches, customer service assistance and even product or feature development to the needs, behaviors and concerns of each buyer persona. A tailored, contextualized approach means your efforts will resonate more strongly with target buyers, bringing you better results.
These are just five of the many reasons your organization will benefit from developing buyer personas:
- Inform your marketing strategies. You’ll have a clear understanding of your target personas’ preferences and habits, so you can better tailor your content creation, advertising, priority distribution channels and so on.
- Craft effective messaging. Understanding what resonates with your prospects means you can create marketing materials and sales pitches with strong selling points that are more likely to convert prospects.
- Reduce your sales cycle. You can learn how to educate your prospects at the top of the funnel so they’re already primed for a sales conversation, reducing the burden on your sales reps and shortening closing time.
- Make your marketing relevant. Relevance is the key to earning attention from your prospects. Segment and contextualize your interactions through the funnel (and entire customer lifecycle) to each target persona and they’ll be more likely to engage.
- Align product development. Knowing your target personas’ most pressing challenges and understanding what they value most will help you prioritize product development according to the most impactful changes.
Ready to get started? Start developing buyer personas today — and see how our template can make the process even easier.
This post originally appeared on the Metis Communications blog.