A buyer persona is one of those buzzwords thrown around in Marketing and Product Management. How frequently it is used will make you think everyone knows exactly what it is.
However, buyer personas are often a concept many don’t fully understand.
So, if this is your first time inquiring about what buyer persona is, you are better informed than others. Firstly, understand that buyer persona is a simple concept. However, as fundamental as it is, it’s influential to a business’ success. Hence, a complete understanding of the concept is vital to your skillset as a marketer.
Let’s first define buyer persona.
What Is a Buyer Persona?
Buyer personas are profiles created for a product or company’s target customers. The information on the profile isn’t randomly included; they are premised on standard research.
With a buyer persona, you get a clear, summarized view of your perfect customer’s personality, daily activities, challenges, decision-making process, etc.
Now, it’s vital to understand that businesses can have more than one buyer persona. Furthermore, there’s no limit to the number of buyer personas created. Each class of people (target customers) must be profiled.
Individual buyer personas have specific criteria. Addressing each of these criteria will also require differing strategies. Investing resources to develop adequate buyer personas reflects the business’s commitment to empathizing with customers. When a company empathizes with customers, enhancing deliverables becomes imminent.
Summarily, to build a better product, buyer personas are critical.
Importance of Buyer Personas
Building buyer personas may take some time, but it’s vital to work. Here are reasons to place a premium on buyer persona development.
Identifying Needs and Wants
The buyer personas contain details of what the customers need and want. The insight gives clear broad direction to either product or marketing teams.
A significant aspect of buyer personas is the details of the customer’s motivator. Identifying what causes a specific customer to buy can help improve future sales. If you don’t know why they buy, you can’t know how to sell to them.
A buyer persona can also give insights leading to new product or service developments. Not all buyer personas afford you such luxury. At the least, though, you get direction on marketing strategy.
Diving Deeper into Purchase Decisions
Having details of everything about your customers makes it easier to understand their purchase decisions. In addition, when you know how they buy, you’ll learn how to approach them. For instance, if your persona says most shopping is done online, it’s a waste of resources to try marketing to them offline.
Behavioral Insight
As a business owner, you want to know how your customer interacts with your product. Details of how to behave outside your product are also highly invaluable. For example, you want to know where they frequently visit online, what kind of content motivates them on social media, etc. That’s why most businesses pay giant data aggregators like Google, Facebook, etc.
Also, be ready to adapt your marketing materials to each platform upon knowing their behavior. For example, how you’ll communicate your product on LinkedIn differs from what’s required for success on TikTok.
Targeted Content
A buyer person gives insight into how to appeal to your potential customers. When you know what they are interested in and how you can create content accordingly.
List Segmentation
Data segmentation, lead enrichment for CRM, etc., are common marketing practices to drive increased sales. Buyer personas can help with these. In addition, you can better customize your mailing list alongside other marketing automation thanks to the buyer personas.
How to Create Buyer Personas
There are different places to start creating a buyer persona. Of course, there’s no one size fits all. Irrespective of the method you choose, you’ll need to do any; research, survey distribution, and interview. Let’s take a closer look at building a buyer persona from scratch.
Conduct Your Research
Conducting in-depth research gives you a better understanding of your client. Clients won’t tell you what they want. They don’t know what they want. It’s your job to find out, whichever way you can. First, you should know who is buying from you. You can do this through interviews, talking to your clients, customer-facing employees, etc.
Segment Your Buyer Personas
Research takes time. Hence, when you’re done, leave sometimes. Come back to sort through all the details you’ve gotten. Organize the information in a way that’s better understandable. You should also know how many buyer personas you’ll need to make. You can segment buyer personas by industry, job titles, purchasing power, etc.
Create a Name and User Story for Each Persona
This is where the writing begins. Start with one buyer persona, create a name for the segment, and write a user story. First, write down details defining your buyer is; age, job title, residence, hobbies, career, ambitions, etc.
Roles, Goals, and Challenges
It’s important to know what roles your potential customers occupy, their goals with your product, and what challenges they have.
Creating Marketing Campaigns with Buyer Personas
You can craft suitable marketing campaigns when you know everything about your potential customers. You should develop tailored marketing campaigns for as many buyer personas as possible.
Final Take
Buyer personas may take time to create, but they inform marketing decisions. Also, you shouldn’t create one-off buyer personas. Instead, constantly update the profile whenever something changes with your potential customers. Keeping buyer personas up to date is as vital as having any in the first place.
