What are buyer personas and why you need to have them clearly defined for your business
I love meeting new people and learning about them. Every human being is like a living story to me. If one asks good questions and shows that they really care about the other person, then it is possible that the relationship with the new acquaintance will turn into a meaningful one. The reason I am telling you this is that today I am writing about the buyer persona, which is sort of a similar process, but, for marketing purposes.
Last week in my post about the customer decision journey, we talked about the steps that customers take before making their final purchase. However, knowing the stages of customers’ decisions may not be sufficient. It is also important to know about your customers by asking the following questions:
- Who are your customers?
- What are their needs?
- What demographics are they representing?
- What do they value in their personal and professional lives?
- What are their challenges?
- How can you best address/solve their problems?
Knowing answers to the aforementioned questions may help your business develop the products and services that will meet the needs and interests of the customers. So in short, a buyer persona is a well-researched description of the customers that you are targeting.
Why are buyer personas important?
Many businesses often rely on their marketing communication on promotions and ‘product talk’, rather than addressing the needs of their customers. This is the wrong strategy! Customers are complex human beings with various needs and interests. They all want to buy products and services that would improve their lives. In order to meet these needs, businesses must first figure out who they are selling their products. Right now, I made a mistake and talked about the sales aspect of creating a buyer persona. However, before selling a product, we first need to develop it by knowing which buyer personas we are targeting. Businesses have to be aware of the fact that before developing a product it is important to know what kind of buyer personas you are developing the product for. Allow me to expand on this idea by showing an analogy. If you have read my previous posts, then you have already understood that I love using analogies while making a point 😄 Anyhow, I’ll get to the point, right now…
I am sure many of you have been to job interviews. Every person’s objective during the interview is to ‘sell’ their best skills, knowledge, and experiences to the prospective employer. Before going to the interview, while conducting research about the company, one of the questions you may ask is — who is the person that is going to interview me? Finding answers to this question would be really helpful in preparing for the interview; knowing how to talk, what to tell and what not to tell, etc. So, knowing your customers, understanding their needs, and empathizing with their current pain and challenges would also be helpful in developing the products that would meet their needs. Creating buyer personas would help you to achieve that goal.
In addition, creating buyer personas can be helpful to align all work across your company starting from product development, to marketing, to customer support. If all the teams in your company know what buyer personas you are targeting and have designed a unified company strategy to meet the needs of those buyer personas, then the chances of you increasing your return on investment (ROI) would dramatically increase.
The steps to creating your buyer personas
While reading the post you might wonder how the buyer personas actually look and what are the steps to create them. Well, the marketing source, React proposes the following steps in order to create buyer personas:
1. Gather as much information as possible
- You can use your own marketing metrics, web analytics, questionnaires, and surveys in order to collect as much information as possible about your audience.
2. Segment your personas
- While collecting information about your audience, you will find out that there are so many customers representing a multitude of different backgrounds, ages, demographics, etc. Therefore, it is good to split your audience into different segments to better personalize your marketing strategies. Personalized marketing strategies may increase customer engagement by six times than non-personalized business strategies.
3. Cover the basics
- Come up with a title, image, demographic trait, and character description for your persona segment. Produce a quote describing that segment’s feelings, impressions, thoughts about your product or service.
4. Dive a little deeper
- Describe your buyer persona in a little more detailed fashion — what kind of people are they? Try to identify what is it that motivates your customer to buy your product. Moreover, find out their frustration and concerns in terms of buying your product — what difficulties are they having while trying to make a purchase?
5. Cover the final details
- Find out how you can connect with your buyer personas. What websites are they using? What blogs are they reading? What do they do online? What social media channels are they using? Come up with a two-way communication system through which your buyer personas can interact with you.
This of course sounds like a lengthy process… but it’s worth it! If you either do not have time, resources, or knowledge for conducting this research — you can generate your personalized marketing plan with up to clearly defined 3 target personas using Growth Channel AI. This is how it could look like:
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In this ocean of companies that fiercely compete for customers, attracting and retaining buyers is a difficult task to fulfill. Having a clear understanding of the needs of the customers and accordingly devising solutions for their challenges can help businesses attract new customers and retain them. Here are the key take-aways for you:
- Getting to know your customers helps you build a better relationship with them, delight, and ultimately increase your return on investment.
- While creating your buyer personas, write everything down, and organize everything you have written. Do not forget to split your audience into segments.
- Be sensitive towards the challenges your customers encounter while buying your product. This is an opportunity for you to improve their experience with your product and services. Your customers will appreciate it!
- Be more strategic and align all work across your company operations, starting from product development, to marketing, to customer support. Creating buyer personas just for marketing is not enough. There has to be a holistic approach.
Let’s have some fun! Share one or a few of your buyer personas in the comments below 👇
