Put simply, acquiring customers requires different skills and tools — one of which is the buyer persona. A buyer persona,
according to Hubspot, “is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.”
To learn about your prospects, you can conduct surveys, interviews, and polls, then look for common themes on which to build a buyer persona. Then, you can supplement this qualitative data with information from web analytics tools, such as
Google and
Facebook Analytics.
Still, creating a buyer persona is just the first part. You also need to know how buyer personas will fit into your marketing strategy.
Why Buyer Personas Are Important:
In short, buyer personas help you market your business more effectively. They do this in two primary ways:
1. They Force You to Think Carefully About Your Customers and Prospects
To create a buyer persona, you must do research to find the common characteristics among your prospects. These characteristics might include their age, gender, job title, career phase, most common objections, and more.
By conducting research, you’ll learn more about your customers and dispel false assumptions about them that you didn’t know you were making. Inevitably, a better understanding of your customers will improve your ability to sell to them, whether you’re cold calling or writing a blog post.
2. They Help You Create a Consistent Voice for Your Business
Running a small business doesn’t leave much time for creating ads, social media posts, blogs, and email campaigns. That’s where a writer can come in to take at least some of the load off your shoulders. Still, bringing in writers means bringing in new voices that’ll be representing your brand. By establishing strong buyer personas, you can provide your team with a powerful tool that they can use to ensure their voice speaks to your most important readers.
What You Should Consider When Crafting Your Buyer Persona
At the very least, you should include information about the behaviors, interests, preferences, demographics, and expectations of your customers in your buyer personas.
Hubspot suggests getting information about your customers’ biggest challenges as well as their shopping preferences, education, career path, company size, job title, skills, knowledge, tools, and more.
Generally, the more information the better, but since you don’t have unlimited resources to dedicate to customer research, it’s up to you to decide exactly how much data to gather. At the very least, you should feel like your personas give you a clear idea of what customers your business should be targeting.
How to Use a Buyer Persona
Buyer personas are useful tools, but only if you use them correctly. They’re generally best used to help you and your team think about your customers when making decisions about your sales and marketing strategy. For example, you can use information from your buyer personas to predict whether a certain message will resonate most effectively in an email campaign, as part of a webcast, or both.
Buyer personas are also useful for brainstorming sales and
marketing strategies. They can help you come up with ideas for everything from marketing campaigns to sales and customer support scripts.
Conclusion: Focus on Crafting Your Buyer Personas
When it’s just you and a few other employees, you may be focused enough on your target customers that you can get by without a buyer persona. However, as your company grows, your marketing machine will grow, and it’ll become very easy to lose focus.
In today’s marketplace, where customer experience is the key competitive differentiator, the importance of staying focused on your customer has expanded well beyond marketing. To that end, buyer personas can serve as a useful tool for even more than marketing your business in the right way to the right people.