What is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is are a fictitious representation of your ideal customer, based on what you already know of your customer base, as well as through conducting market research. It’s the type of person who you want to attract to spend money with your business.
A buyer persona is basically personalized segments of your target audience that have been created into useful personalities in which your staff (sale and marketing) will use to sell and market to.
The Persona will cover things such as demographics, values and pain points, as well as what the persona is actually looking for from your products and services.
In essence, it defines your ideal clients’ wants and needs into a nice little package that will allow your staff to get to know who they are selling to.
Why do we need them?
You need a buyer persona when your marketing a product or service to people, you basically want those leads and qualified leads to turn into customers. How do we get these leads? Through people searching online hopefully.
There are a lot of things that need to be done to allow the right person to find your product on the web. You need to have good SEO practises, and you need to have content that’s searchable.
Still, how do they find your product among the mass of other ads and products that reside on the interwebs? Not just that, but you want them to actually be customers, so we are talking about leads that need to be qualified and then converted into customers.
Creating a buyer persona will allow you to create and focus content to the right potential customers, not the time wastes, and it will also allow you to focus on actual meaningful content that will highlight issues, answer the question, as well as provide solutions and services throughout the buyer’s journey. Allowing your marketers to focus their attention in the right content, at the right time, for the right eyes.
Personalising the experience
How do you personalise the buyer’s journey so that at any point through it your potential customer is getting exactly what they need? A Buyers Persona.
You can personalise your content offers, the type of content, emails as well as give excellent indicators to your sales team in as far as lead nurturing, or onboard the customer.
Buyer Persona may be fictitious but they are a very valuable tool in any inbound marketing campaign. According to Hub Spot, using them in your marketing can make your website 2 to 5 times more effective.
You can have 1 persona for a campaign, or you can have 5. If you’re selling a product or service to a lot of different segments, then make a persona for each.
This makes sense as one segment is not going to respond as well to one kind of content or solution offering as it may to another that has been personalised to meet their actual question, pain points or needs?
Let’s take a very broad look – selling clothing to woman, men and children?
This may be the same brand or even similar products but the marketing to each of these segments is going to be, in most cases vastly different.
Try to make a sale to a 12-year-old girl, with the same marketing your using for her father and see how well that does.
So what’s involved in the Creation Process
We have a blog dedicated to an entire post on this process. Make sure to read our upcoming blog on “how to Create a Buyer Person”, or download our premade template and examples here. I will break it down here for you though, so we have a basic understanding.
Firstly, there is the research. This is done by asking your sales team, your frontline staff as well as your existing customers. You can gather this information by looking at your analytics and social media channels, conduct online surveys, or interviews.
Secondly, asking the right questions. Basically you need to develop questions to find out what your ideal customer’s goals, struggles and habits are and try to address them. Developing the correct questions to ask is very important.
Thirdly, the creation process. Once you have the data, you can use a template to formulate your persona into a living document. Add a picture, give it a name and develop a back story of how what and most importantly why. Bring your creation to life!
Living Breathing Personas
Treat your persona like the people they are representing, give them a name, a face and a purpose, as well as room to grow. Never let them waste away, give them attention, and build upon your original persona. Allow it to evolve and grow as your customers do.
Want to jump in and start creating your own right away? Make sure you read our next blog on how to Create a Buyer Persona.
