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.
Creating Buyer Personas
Creating buyer personas might seem difficult at first, but once you have a plan it’s a sure fire way to increase sales and find customers more efficiently. It enables businesses to truly understand their buyers and better appropriate content and services to meet their needs. With this tool in your arsenal, there’s no doubt you’ll see a noticeable difference in your business performance.
Need more help? Check out these free templates.
Complete Guide on Crafting Buyer Personas
If there’s one thing that makes any conversation easier, it’s knowing who you’re talking to! Okay, so maybe it’s not the most profound insight. But you’d be surprised how many marketers attempt to churn out content with no regard for who will actually read it. Creating a buyer persona is a time-honored trick that can help you better understand your target audience and what will resonate with them.
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a fictional character that embodies the key characteristics of your target audience - the people most likely to be interested in your products or services. For example, if you sell dog food, your target audience is likely to be (you guessed it) dog owners.
But while this is a good start, the more facts you know about your target audience, the higher the odds that you'll be able to appeal to them. Once you have a good understanding of the traits your target audience shares, you'll take things a step further by meshing them together into a fictional buyer persona.
Why Are Buyer Personas Important?
While knowing the characteristics of your target audience is important, content is written to engage people, not traits. Turning your target audience into a person, even a fictional one, is a surprisingly handy visualization exercise.
Gearing your message to your target persona can increase the odds that it will relate to as many members of your target audience as possible. Just as you'd likely use very different language when writing a letter to your best friend vs. your elderly grandmother, visualizing a buyer persona can help shape your message accordingly.
How to create a buyer persona, step by step
Understand your target audience
First things first. Use fact-based research to determine the traits your target audience shares - stereotypes and assumptions will do you absolutely no favors here. If your business is already established, your sales team should have plenty of insights. You can also use:
- Website analytics
- Competitor analysis
- Market research tools
- Customer surveys or online forms
- Personal interactions with customers
Start with the basics
Rather than delving into your target persona’s psyche right out of the gate, start with the basics. Is your persona a young mom, a high-power CEO, or a retiree ready to live their best life?
Keep in mind that some businesses have more than one persona to reflect different audience groups. Just don’t get too crazy - try to start with two-three personas rather than developing an entire fictional town.
Ask the right questions
Now it’s time to get to know your persona by utilizing all the information you have available. Start by giving them a name, whether it be “Maggie the Mom” or “Joe the CEO.” Then build out their character by filling in traits like:
- Demographics (age range, gender, income level)
- Profession or industry
- Education level
- Interests or hobbies
- Values or ethics
- Pain points and challenges
- Preferred content channels and types
Buyer Persona Example
Let’s take a look at a buyer persona example to demonstrate the principles we’ve discussed in action. Imagine that your small local business sells organic clothing for babies. Up to now, you’ve primarily operated in a physical retail location but have scored a few extra sales on Etsy.
Now you’re ready to take your business to the next level by expanding your e-commerce efforts and drawing in business with a digital marketing campaign. Your buyer persona might look a little something like this:
Name: Ellen the Eco-friendly mom
Demographics: 25 - 35, married, lives in a medium-large city
Profession: Successful small business owner
Values: Sustainability, eco-friendly products, supporting other small business owners
Goals/Challenges: Finding baby clothes that are cute, comfortable, and high-quality
Preferred e-Commerce channels: Amazon, Etsy
