Understand the need for creating buyer personas for your business, to effectively target your audience through improved digital marketing strategies. A descriptive and fictional representation of your business’s ideal customer will bring insights on their needs, wants and preferences. Digital marketers can then use this knowledge to create content that resonates with their ideal buyer, leading to brand loyalty and marketing success.
Summary : A buyer persona is a fictional representation of a business’s ideal customer, created to help businesses better understand and target their audience. To create a buyer persona, businesses can research their current customer base, talk to customer-facing sales staff and current customers, and research competitors to identify the profile of customers who buy from them. The ideal buyer’s description will include information like age, gender, location, challenges, interests, and affinities. By analyzing the current customer base and gathering insights from the pre-sale, conversion, and post-sale processes, businesses can create a detailed narrative about their ideal customer. This can be used to justify marketing efforts and familiarize the sales and marketing teams with the business’s ideal buyers. By creating ad campaigns and content that speak to the identified pain points and challenges of each persona, businesses can optimize their marketing efforts and better target potential customers. Overall, the creation of a buyer persona helps businesses gain insights into their target audience and create more targeted marketing campaigns.
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a descriptive representation of a business’s ideal customer and is differentiated from the terms, target market and target audience, which are centered around segmenting customers into different groupings to help make better informed business decisions. The buyer persona describes and paints a picture about a fictional ideal customer who would represent the current customer base as well as prospective future customers. As different customers may buy a product or service for varying reasons, and because a business may have a multitude of product or service offerings, it would be a requirement for most businesses to create multiple buyer persona’s that represent their ideal customers.
Why create a buyer persona?
Gaining insights and knowledge about who they are marketing and selling to, is the simple reasoning behind the requirement for researching and creating buyer personas for a business. The identified needs, wants and goal of the ideal customer as well as the challenges and pain points that they may have, are all documented within the narrative about the fictional buyer. A comprehensive research undertaking and highly detailed ideal buyer description will give a business added information, enabling them to create better content and more relevant promotional campaigns.
How to create a buyer persona?
Creating a buyer persona for a business will include researching the current customer base and audience insights, talking to customer facing sales staff and current customers as well as undertaking competitor research to identify the profile of customers who buy from the competition. The ideal buyer’s description will include information like age, gender, location, challenges, interests and affinities, etc. The more the information contained within the profile, the easier it will be for a business to target potential customers by knowing who the customer is, what they are interested in as well as what expectations they may have from the company in terms of the product and service.
Analyzing the current customer base to identify a business’s ideal customer is possibly the best starting point in creating a buyer persona, because not only would the business already have the required demographic, affinity and interest information about their typical buyer, they would also have gathered insights from the pre-sale and conversion processes that worked, as well as the post-sale fulfillment expectations of the buyer. Talking to front line sales is another good source of customer intelligence as the sales team would be aware of the typical buyer profiles they interact with as well as their generalized queries and concerns when converting leads or nurturing prospects. Gaining customer and prospect feedback through interviews, survey and focus groups, etc. generates highly relevant information that can all be factored into the mix to help create an extensive narrative about a business’s ideal customer.
Collecting and documenting specific buyer information such as demographics, occupation, company, industry, designation and experience, etc. right from the beginning during the lead generation process, and then adding on to that even more information subsequently during the lead nurturing phase such as why they require the product and what are their expectations of the business, etc. is a good practice to have when marketing and selling to customers, ensuring the business has structured data that can be easily analyzed and then generalized to create a buyer persona.
Utilizing the buyer persona
Upon creating relevant buyer personas, these fictional profiles can be used to help justify the marketing efforts that are being executed and also to familiarize the sales and marketing teams about the businesses ideal customers and how they need to be approached and nurtured. Creating Ad campaigns that optimize on each persona’s favorite social media platform and promoting content that speak to their identified pain points and challenges are some immediate benefits that can be derived through this exercise. Analyzing the current content to make changes and using the buyer persona information to optimize landing pages and lead generation mechanisms that resonate better with the buyer, are other positive outcomes that are enabled through this process.
