Building a Buyer Persona is one of the most critical steps for your business, it helps you identify your target audience and their requirements. So, you can devise your marketing toolkits, sales pitches, and all marketing campaigns for the right targeted audience. If you don’t invest in creating buyer personas, then you will end up spending more budget and effort by targeting such persons who weren’t your ideal customers in the 1st place.
In simple words, having a rich understanding of your buyer persona(s) is vital to crafting an effective content strategy, lead generation campaigns, pricing strategies, improving your products or services, and all other things that cast a significant impact on your to retain and attract customers.
In this guide, we will highlight the importance of buyer personas, how to create them, marketing tips, and the best examples of buyer personas.
What Are Buyer Personas?
The buyer persona is a comprehensive and semi-fictional description of your ideal customers who are likely to buy your products or services. This description is primarily based on data and market research. A buyer persona helps you aim your efforts towards high-potential prospects, revamp your product development process to sustain the actual needs and expectations of your customers, and align your marketing and sales teams for better synchronization and efficiency.
As a result, you attract high potential website visitors, hot leads, and long-term customers to your brand who you are more likely to become consistent buyers.
Are Marketing Personas important for your business?
Building buyer personas help you determine your target customers, their preferences, and expectations perfectly. It boosts the efficacy and efficiency of different processes in your business from content production, advertisement campaigns, reasonable pricing, and development process to address the particular needs, of your target customers and prospects.
For instance, if you are running an insurance service business, you know your target customers are insurance seekers. But you don’t know what their specific requirements and priorities are? What are the events that persuade your customers to look for insurance? How much a client is ready to pay for an insurance service? What are the aspects they look for in an insurance service and insurance plan? In order to get a deeper understanding of what makes your ideal customers choose a particular insurance service at a particular time, it’s vital to start buyer persona development for your business with the right approach.
How to create a buyers persona
There are 4 main stages for creating personas
Quantitative Analysis (Gather Customers Data )
To craft an effective and fruitful buyer persona you need to perform comprehensive research. Even if think you already have a sound understanding of your ideal customers and target market, it’s highly recommended to question your assumption. Start with your quantitative research by:
- Gathering demographic information regarding your customers
- Age
- Location
- Language
- Spending power and patterns
- Interests
- Challenges
- Gathering Company and Revenue Information
- Company Name
- Industry
- Company Revenue
- Number of Employees
- Country
- City
- Annual Contract Value
- Total Lifetime Value
- Discover how they interact with your products and services
- No of logins
- Time they spend
- No of action performed by your product
- Interview your sales and marketing team for data gathering
- Question your sales team for the type of customers, mostly questions they ask, how much knowledge they have regarding products/services, and the negative feedback they hear most often.
- Include your marketing team to collect information regarding demographics data from web analytics & social platforms, most engaging content, lowest engaging content, and successful and failed campaigns along with their KPIs.
Qualitative Analysis (know your customers)
This stage is also linked with the buyer persona research. It also involves research to know your customers, their requirements, and how your products or services can solve their problems. You need to:
Interview your customers about what they like about your product or service.
- Questions related to their profession or job roles.
- What is your job role or position?
- What does an average day at work look like?
- What are the skills mandatory to fit in your job role?
- What methodologies or software/hardware tools do you use the most in your job?
- Who’s your reporting authority?
- What are the roles and number of team members that come under your authority?
- What is your department?
- What are your responsibilities in the role, team, or company?
- What are the KPIs of your job role?
- Questions related to Business or Industry
- In which niche or industry does your organization serves?
- Whether your company is an SMB or enterprise-grade organization?
- What is the scale of your operations (production, revenue, employees)?
- Questions related to content preferences
- Where do you prefer to learn something new related to your profession?
- What type of content do you consume the most, blog posts, eBooks, podcasts, etc?
- Do you attend any webinars or online training sessions?
- On which social media platform do you spend most of your time?
- Questions related to background or challenges
- What are your demographics (ask for their age, marital status, number of children, country, state, or region)?
- What level of education did you complete, which college or school did you attend, and what is the subject of your studies?
- Where do you see yourself at the end of this decade or after X years?
- What else do you want to accomplish before your retirement?
- What are your retirement plans?
- What is your biggest challenge or a nightmare?
- What triggers your concerns about professional stability?
- What changes does COVID19 bring to your life (social, personal, and professional).
Outreach (email) your existing customers and ask for their experience and feedback to improve products or services.
Consider the following email templates:
Identify customer goals and pain points and how your services are effective in solving them
- Customer Roles
- Goals
- Challenges
- Solutions
Drafting the Persona
Now you have collected all the vital information and data that impact your buyer personas. The next step is to ensure that every team member knows how to attract, hook, support, and satisfy your customers. It requires comprehensive documentation and organization of your collected information in an easily understandable and presentable format.
Gather all Data in one place
Write all collected information in one place and start looking for similarities in the goals and challenges you’ve uncovered in your research. It is necessary to look for similarities in the goals and challenges before organizing your collected information. It will also offer you discover some hidden and key insights that you might be neglecting in the first place.
Start organizing your collected information in terms of
- Segment Buyer Personas By Industry
- Buyer Personas By Job Title
- By use cases, challenges, solutions
- Buying triggers, product & services features
Transform your collected data into characters and stories
Organized and structured data always tell a story and solution to a particular problem. Understand the context and create hypothetical names or characters around stories to get a rich and human-understandable perspective of your collected data.
Lead your storytelling towards a conclusion by introducing any character, their interests, demographics, challenges, solution and how your business offerings can help them achieve their goals faster.
Socializing the Persona ( Educating your internal teams )
Once you build a persona now is time to educate your sales teams, marketing teams, and customer support specialists. This last step involves:
Making printed and digital copies
Prepare detailed and insightful copies of your buyer personas and their blueprints to share with your marketing teams. Knowledge sharing in the form of printed and digital copies helps your team in brainstorming ideas and adds value to the process by making necessary suggestions.
Organizing training and information sessions
The pace of your growth is determined by the capabilities of your weakest team members. Plan and organize scrum meetings and training sessions for your team and help them onboard the same page. It’s vital to make all your team members well informed about the whole process to abstain anyone from lacking behind.
Inviting real customers to your session for a better understanding
For a clear and doubt-free picture of all your strategies, don’t forget to invite real customers in joining the process. Your customers can highlight some of the key and hidden aspects that your team has kept neglecting.
Examples of well-crafted buyer personas
Consider the following customer persona examples to get a clear understanding of what your buyer persona should look like:
Example 1 – B2B Buyer Persona
Consider the example of following a B2B buyer persona for an individual linked with HRM services. The persona showcases a rich outlook of the target customer’s pain points and how the company can best sustain their requirements, such as making the recruiting process easier and streamlined and helping HR experts manage and schedule their tasks.
Image Source – HubspotB2C Buyer Persona Example
Consider the following example of a B2C buyer persona for a music streaming platform. The outcomes of developing this B2B buyer persona showcase a need for a streaming service as a mobile application with a user-friendly interface. It must offer notifications about the latest music additions and makes it simple for a user to explore new music based on their interests.
How to use your buyer persona to improve your marketing efforts
Once you acknowledge your targeted customers and craft an effective customer persona, you can revamp and improve your marketing and sales strategies and aim all their efforts toward those customers who have a high potential to buy from you. It interns boost your ROI and reduce customer acquisition cost up to a notable extent. Some key areas that undergo improvement include:
Paid Campaigns
In paid advertisement campaigns like PPC or google ads, you will be charged for every click your Ad viewers make on your advertisement. Therefore, it becomes mandatory to choose the right keywords to target the right set of audiences with your paid campaigns. Otherwise, you will end up exacerbating your ROI.
By developing a research-based and comprehensive buyer persona, you know which set of audiences to avoid by targeting the prospects that fit your marketing persona. It helps you aim your efforts toward the right audience and improve ROI for the paid campaigns.
Content Marketing
A research-backed marketing persona let you know what your ideal customers want to consume as content. It helps you determine your potential customers’ needs, pain points, conflicts, & expectations and help you create the most effective content marketing strategy for blogs, newsletters, social media and other marketing materials for your readers. You can decide the priority of your content format and the platform of engagement. It helps you in setting up effective lead magnets and earns you the hottest leads from your industry.
Improve Landing Pages
Buyer personas help you improve all key areas of your digital marketing strategy including landing pages. They help you design and develop a conversion-centric lead generation landing page to boost conversion rates and generate more leads or sales for your business.
Improve conversion rates & sales funnels
A well-researched and organized buyer persona helps you in optimizing all the stages of your B2B sales funnel from brand awareness to sales conversion. They help you understand your customer’s buyer journey and expectations that you can leverage to craft different types of content for each stage of your sales funnel. An optimized sales funnel means more sales qualified leads and high conversion rates.
Improve Lead Generation Campaigns
Buyer personas let you improve your lead generation campaigns up to a remarkable extent. Creating a Marketing persona gives you leverage to define who is more likely to purchase your products or services. This is the foremost step to engaging hot leads. With qualified leads, you can boost conversion rates, optimize your lead generation funnel and spare most of your marketing budget and efforts that you otherwise spend on low-quality leads.
Conclusion
Develop your buyer personas to determine the hot customers in your niche and know their needs and expectations on a deeper level. It will help you improve your brand awareness campaigns, boost conversion rates, and skyrocket your ROI.
