All About Buyer Persona and How to Create It
The term “Buyer Persona” comes up within almost every marketing course, blog posts, and other informative materials. A lot of businesses might presume that everyone else already knows about it, has one, and is utilizing it.
Even existing companies have to redefine the profile of their customers every so often, let alone the newbies who are just about to build their GTM (go-to-market) strategy.
What Do You Understand by Buyer Persona?
Buyer Persona is a conceptual representation of an ideal customer, built around both quantitative as well as qualitative data collected from market/competition research and existing consumer profiles.
Although creating a buyer persona is not about explaining the brand’s potential customers, it is about developing a set of insights that the product, marketing, and sales department can use to make well-informed decisions and savvy investments.
Importance of Buyer Persona for Businesses
After conducting an initial market analysis, defining your buyer personas is the next sensible step in outlining your product development, marketing, and overall business strategy.
Ultimately, knowing your target audience is essential for the overall business development – from product creation to marketing activities, it plays a significant role in each stage. Buyer Personas help the businesses in deciding:
- Where to lead product development
- What types of content they should create
- How they should follow up on leads
- How they should deal with matters related to customer acquisition and retention
As a result, determining the target buyer personas will help your business grab a share of attention from high-value visitors, attract relevant leads, and accelerate their conversion and retention procedures.
Buyer Personas guide many important processes across an organization:
- When crafting product guidelines, product development can depend on buyer persona insights. Target consumer profiles unveil what the audience wants or needs from the product or service. This allows the product development team to prioritize product modifications and get to know if there are any prominent changes that need to be made to the product.
- Marketers utilize buyer personas to enhance marketing strategies and approaches. From keyword research to writing a copy to making external content placement decisions, with buyer persona insights, marketers are able to create the most effective promotional and advertising strategies for brands.
- With buyer persona insights, we get to know the pain points or challenges our target audience is currently facing. This information can come handy to the sales team, who can then work on polishing their sales pitch and pointing out which features/aspects they should highlight.
- The insights from buyer persona profiles can help the customer support team get better training, know in advance the problems their target audience is facing, and improve the services they offer.
How Buyer Personas Help in Making Strategic Marketing Decisions?
Buyer Persona insights are used to design more relevant messaging, customize content strategy, and develop highly focused and more personalized customer experiences.
Buyer Personas help the marketers in understanding their existing as well as prospective customers better and reveal what appeals the most to their target audience and makes them pick one brand or product over the other.
Be it email, digital, content, or social, knowing the key features of the buyer persona should benefit each and every marketing aspect. So how do marketers utilize these insights?
Let’s dive into the details.
- Enable Better Customer Segmentation
Marketing to everybody does no good for your business. You might have a ready-to-use definition of your target audience, but the buyer personas can bring in intricate details that will enhance your marketing strategy and help capture more and better-qualified leads.
- Provide Personalized Brand Experience
By knowing the pain points and challenges that your customers face, marketers are able to develop more targeted messaging, ensure effective content delivery, and facilitate customized offerings.
- Identify where the high-value leads hang out
Content development is just the tip of the advertising iceberg; its distribution and reach are equally or even more important. Simply because if your distribution is not right, your content won’t reach the audience and get lost in the ocean of content online.
Typically, a buyer persona profile mentions where your high-value leads spend most of their time (online). This helps you get insights into which platforms and channels you need to target with high-quality, original, and engaging content to make sure it reaches them.
- Cross-Marketing Alignment
To maintain alignment across different marketing teams, marketers can always return and review their defined buyer persona profiles to ensure that their efforts are fulfilling the needs of their consumers.
Finding Data to Create a Buyer Persona
Now that we know what buyer persona is, how important it is for businesses, and how it can improve our marketing strategies, it’s time to uncover how to find data to create a buyer persona. One of the best ways to acquire enough information to define your target audience is via existing customers’ data.
- Interviewing the Existing Customers
Existing customers might like giving an interview to a brand they use or have a close connection with, especially if the brand offers them some extra bonus like a discount, voucher, gift coupon, and much more!
Moreover, interviewing your former customers can also be beneficial as they can provide insights into why they stopped using your product/service and which alternative they are currently using and why.
Using site forms and questionnaires can help marketers welcome a large segment of the audience who just follows your brand on social media or reads your blogs. This will help to find out what is stopping them from making a purchase and becoming the brand’s customer.
- Taking insights from the sales team
Salespeople are the ones speaking to existing customers and potential buyers on behalf of the brand all day. Asking them can help marketers get to know a thing or two about the qualitative part of a buyer persona profile like customer’s pain points, expectations, challenges, values, needs, goals, and much more.
- Collecting insights from business/digital data
For starters, Google Analytics is a source of extremely valuable information regarding both existing as well as potential customers. Along with this, using CRM (customer relationship management) tools and other technology-driven analytics software can help you get in-depth insights about the interests, behavioral patterns, habits, etc. of your target customers.
Merging Google Analytics insights with Facebook Audience Insights can help you acquire a lot of valuable research data.
Conclusion
Knowing your customers better has become a basic necessity for crafting a successful marketing strategy. Defining your buyer personas is an excellent way to make your business strategy better, improvise product development, and make better marketing and investment decisions.