What Is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is like your target market, but more specific. It’s a projection of your ideal customer, based on information about your current customers and the industry that you work in. As a business owner, having this buyer persona gives you a better way to understand the demographics of your target market. It helps you to be a business which can establish human connections with the people, with empathy at the core of everything that you do.
Why Do You Need a Buyer Persona
As a modern business, it’s important that you find ways to help your customers. Not just with the products and services that you offer, but also with the content that you provide online. Relationships between brands and their customers are more critical than ever, and having a buyer persona helps you to use empathy to create these trusting, loyal, and very importantly, long-lasting, relationships.
Building a buyer persona gives you a far more detailed insight into the people that you want to be using your business. It’s your opportunity to learn more about what they want and need, what they are missing, the problems that they are seeking solutions to, what you can give them, in terms of products and services and content, and also what might be stopping them from using your business or holding them back.
Having these detailed insights helps you to tailor your products and services, as well as content and communications, so that you are always focused on what prospects, leads and buyers want, and avoiding wasting time on what they don’t. In short, it’s a way to keep buyers happy, which boosts your brand and keeps them coming back.
What Are Buyer Personas Used For?
One of the most obvious uses of buyer personas is marketing. We use our personas to help us send targeted marketing to specific groups. This can lead to much higher ROI and greater levels of conversion.
But, marketing isn’t the only way that we can use buyer personas. They can also help us to create targeted content, boosting our inbound marketing efforts, and appealing to buyers at each stage of their journey.
Buyer personas are fictional, but they are based on real data about your audience. This gives you a more in-depth understanding, helping you to create targeted content and communications, but also products and services. Being able to offer personalized campaigns can save you time and money.
What Are the Benefits of Using a Buyer Persona?
If you create well-defined and realistic buyer personas, there are multiple benefits for your business. Some of these include:
- Buyer personas make it easier to understand the people that are using, or could benefit from your company. This understanding allows you to use an empathetic and personal approach, building real, human connections and relationships.
- Saves time. When you know your customers, you save time by giving them what they want and need straight away.
- Saves money. Widespread marketing campaigns are costly. Personalized campaigns, targeting valuable leads can be cheaper with a higher ROI.
- Personalized campaigns are more effective. It’s thought that these personalized and empathetic campaigns drive 18 times more revenue than widespread, mass emails.
- Improve the quality of leads. When you try to sell yourself to everyone, you waste time and money and conversion is very low. Buyer personas vastly improve the quality of your leads.
- Buyer personas give you a much better way to create helpful content, products and services, making life easier, and improving business growth.
Do You Need More Than One Buyer Persona?
You can have as many, or as few buyer personas as you want. This choice often depends on the nature of your business, your specific products and services, the size of your business, and the demographics that you target.
It’s always a good idea to start with one core buyer persona, before branching out from there. But, to be effective, these personas should be clearly defined, and quite obviously different from each other. This helps you target specific groups within your customer base, as well as potential leads, and people who you think could benefit from your services or products.
If your buyer personas aren’t well-defined or are fairly similar to each other, things can become confusing, and you may be wasting your time. If you can’t see the person clearly as you are building the persona, or they become very similar to a persona that you already have, stop.
Creating a Buyer Persona
Research and data analysis is crucial when it comes to building a buyer persona, and so this is where you should start. Research both your existing customers and any groups which you feel could be a good fit for your company. Do this by looking at your sales, website and social media analytics, by conducting surveys, polls and interviews, and use capture forms online. Do as much research as you can, this will enable you to create a more detailed and so more valuable buyer persona.
Then, start to put together a template. This is a blank persona template, which you fill in using the data that you have collected. It is important, however, to remember that there are two different kinds of buyer template.
A B2B, or business to business, buyer persona, looks at an individual but pays attention to their job, and role in the company. Some fields that you may want to include are:
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Name
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Age
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Gender
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Job title
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Company
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Whether a decision-maker or not
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Industry
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Salary
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Education
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Goals
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Challenges
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Marketing message/strategy – How you would communicate
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Elevator pitch
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Real quotes
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Objections
A B2C, or business to customer buyer personal just looks at the individual. Fields to include here are:
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Name Age
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Gender
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Marital status
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Family size
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Occupation
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Income
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Location
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Education
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Interests
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Challenges
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Personality traits
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Personal goals
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Lifestyle
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Where they go for information - what social media and websites do they use?
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Real quotes
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Objections
How to Use a Buyer Persona
You’ve done your research and built templates; your buyer personas even have names, but now what?
There are several ways to use your buyer personas. You can divide your database into persona groups, allowing you to offer them a personalized experience, you can target your advertising to them individually and create content for specific personas. You can even move your team if your persona spends time on Instagram, but you are currently only putting minimal effort into Instagram marketing, you can move a social media marketer over.
Your buyer personas give you greater control of all areas of your business, as long as you use them well.