marketing

Creating Buyer Personas: 7 Signs You Need Help

By Market Veep

4 min read

You have buyers, yes, but do you understand them? This goes deeper than merely knowing what people buy and when they buy it; it’s about knowing how your customers tick.

Buyer personas are fictional representations of your target customers, created through research of customers past, present, and future.

With buyer personas, you can create a personalized and consistent message that runs concurrently with your sales and marketing teams. The process of creating buyer personas can be challenging, but it's important for reaching your marketing goals.

Here are 7 signs you might need some help:

1. You Don't Know How Your Personas Typically Interact with Vendors

A customer’s interaction with a vendor is the make it or break it point of a sale. Needless to say, you want your vendors to be competent when faced with a pitch. Vendors need to know the person they are trying to sell to. Try asking questions like:

Do personas read up on content before making a purchase?
Are personas’ buying cycles long or short?
How do personas prefer to be contacted?

Creating buyer personas that keep your sales team informed makes for a consistent understanding of your business’s target customers. This also helps vendors tailor sales pitches more efficiently on a customer to customer basis and can lead to a 3X increase in sales.

2. You Don’t Know Who Your Exclusionary Buyer Personas Are

Everyone concentrates on who they are selling to, but they never think about who they should not sell to. This is not to say you should focus excess energy on avoiding customers, you just don’t want to focus too much on a lead that won’t be a customer.

This kind of critical thinking also helps you create buyer personas in general. Exclusionary personas might be individuals that are too advanced for your product or service, meaning they might be in an industry that’s in a different league. They could also be individuals that are too inexperienced, like students visiting your blog for research of their own.

3. You Don’t Know The Challenges Your Buyer Personas Face

Empathy is the key to fully understanding your buyer personas. If you can put yourself in their shoes, you can better help them achieve their goals. With this in mind, it’s important to identify the challenges buyer personas face. Doing so tells you the following: What is the reason they’re coming to your business? How can you cater your content to their needs? What problems can you solve?

4. You Don’t Know What Your Personas Care About

Again, empathy is key to selling and marketing. You want to put yourself in your buyer personas’ shoes to better understand their needs and motivations. These motivations can be anything, from their personal lives (family, living standards, interests, hobbies, etc.) or professional lives (what problems do they encounter day to day? What solutions do they need? Who do they report to?). Once you narrow down what your buyer personas care about, you can better prioritize tasks and meet expectations.

5. You Don’t Know The Responsibilities Of Your Buyer Personas

You might know the general job description your buyer personas have, but do you know their responsibilities? This could be anything from day to day duties to important professional tasks they manage. You want to figure out what their days are like. You can even take responsibilities in personal life into account, like whether or not they have kids or their standards of living. This can give you a better understanding of their attitude towards work, i.e. their work with you and how they might react to your product or service.

6. You Don’t Know What Your Personas Like About Your Product/Service

You know your customers like your product or service, why else would you still be in business? But do you know what exactly they like about it? Creating buyer personas with a clearly defined set of likes and dislikes is essential. That way you know what you’re doing right or what you can improve on. It also gives you the opportunity to accurately advertise your business and keep customers coming back.

7. You Don’t Know Or Understand The Rationale Behind Buyer Personas’ Decisions

This is the culmination of every idea mentioned. You know your buyer persona’s goals, responsibilities, and priorities but do you know how it all works together? It’s important to map out your persona’s journey to better understand their rationale in choosing your business. Having a solid rationale gives you a clear understanding of who your buyer persona is, what they need or want, and how they make decisions. In fact, 90% of businesses with buyer personas have a clearer understanding of who their real buyers are.