What is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is the ideal customer profile. It is a type of person that you create to represent your potential customer. The idea is to create a list of detailed characteristics of their professional background, personal interest, behavioral traits, and more.
Creating a buyer persona is to gain an understanding of their goals, problems, and decision-making patterns. It allows you to construct personalized messages as if you were communicating with a real person. These characteristics serve as a guide for product development and the creation of a marketing strategy that will reach the right audience in the best way possible.
Why Do You Need to Use Buyer Personas?
Buyer Personas are important if you're interested in an in-depth understanding of your audience. It's crucial if you want to identify their needs, interests, and preferences in terms of communication, information, and inspiration. Furthermore, it can also help you develop effective marketing strategies that will engage the right type of customers you want to attract.
With a clear and detailed list of your buyer's needs, you will create more qualified leads that you can easily convert to sales. Creating tailored marketing campaigns is more feasible because you know what problems to focus on in your communications.
A lot of companies are talking about what they're doing instead of asking what the customer needs. Although it is simple to focus on what the customer needs for most businesses, many get distracted from doing so. This affects the customer's purchasing decision-making process. Keep in mind that people usually buy products and services from trusted brands and ask yourself, would you trust and be super engaged in your outgoing communications in the shoes of your buyers?
How Do You Create a Buyer Persona?
Creating a buyer persona begins by conducting thorough research, surveys, and interviews. You can simply draw on your current customers, don't be afraid to utilize non-scalable actions to get those insights. You can also ask potential customers, and existing customers, and of course, if you have a customer database then use that. To get you started, here are some steps that you can take to gather the information you need to develop a buyer persona.
Conduct an Audience Research
The first thing you need to do when you create a buyer persona is to ask yourself about your ideal customers. It's also a great idea to ask your team or staff to complete the exercise, then compare your answers. This will help you narrow down your choices and get the best results.
Another way to make a buyer persona is by looking at your database of existing customers. Find the customers who bring the most revenue to your business or who the most satisfied clients are. Analyze the lists and see if there are similarities between these customers so that they can be grouped accordingly. If you have a close relationship with them you can ask them why they have picked you. It is important to group your audience, it can be based according to their age, location, education, career, interest, revenue, spending, industry, customer retention duration, or any other metric you have to help you find who are the best customers.
Identify the Customer’s Pain Points
There's always a reason for someone to visit your website. They may be interested in your products and services, comparing your brand to other competitors, or just simply browsing. Whatever it is, it’s your job to find out about their problems, concerns, or pain points.
One effective way to do this is through social media marketing. You can set up search streams to monitor posts that might have mentioned your brand when something good (or bad) is mentioned about your products and services. It is also a useful method to determine which part of your marketing strategies needs improvement. In addition, checking your FAQ section or keeping close to your customer service team allows you to identify what questions are commonly asked.
Knowing the Customer’s Goals
The objectives of the customer are the opposite of their problems. Their goals are the things they look forward to seeing or experience with your products and services. Whether it's for a professional or personal purpose, this goal may be directly linked to the solutions that you can offer.
Get to know your customers by trying to figure out what motivates them. Is it timescales? Is it their sales targets? you can use their answers to tailor your proposal. Match their goals with the features and benefits of your offering. Make sure your marketing campaign has an informative yet friendly tone that anyone can relate to. Remember that there are prospects in the middle of the decision-making process, now would be a good time to engage directly or indirectly, or one pro-active competitor may swoop in and get the business.
Focus on Helping the Customer
Apart from thinking about how you can make the most of their purchase, it's more important that you deliver what you offer. At this stage, focus on presenting solutions to the customer on their pain points. You need to give them a clear vision of how exactly your products and services can help them.
Forget about bragging about the features of your brand and think about the benefits you can bring to your customers. Ask yourself how you can make their lives easier or better, what prevents them from buying, or how you can make the buyer’s journey memorable. You can also survey these issues to gather more information.
Create a Buyer Persona
Now that you've collected the information you need to create a buyer persona, you need to give each group a name or anything that defines their characteristics. You have to treat each group as real people who serve as the basis for your unique buyer persona. It will give you the opportunity to walk in your buyer's shoes.
Remember to create a realistic description of the person representing a certain group. Aim as much information as you can, including the pain points and goals of the customer. However, don't expect each customer to match your buyer persona exactly. You need to clearly describe each person to help you align the features of your products and services with the benefits of your customers.
What Information You Should Include in Your Buyer Persona?
If you are creating a buyer persona for the first time and you're wondering what information you should include, then use this example template:
Name and Personal Details
Give each buyer a memorable name. You can use a first name, job title, or personal details such as gender, civil status, or location that will distinguish each other. You can use Marketing Mark, Engineer Ed, or Accountant Alice, for example.
Educational and Employment Background
Provide information on the educational and employment background of your buyer. You can include the university in which they have studied and what course they have taken. You might want to know about the industry, income, and location in terms of their current or previous jobs.
Personal Interests
One of the most important things you need in your buyer persona is the customer’s personal interests. Since you want to capture their attention, you have to find out about their personal and social life. Know about their favorite pastimes outside their work or places they like to visit when they can. Obviously, you will never get the perfect match but feel like you almost know the person is exactly what you want when creating the persona.
Goals and Challenges
It’s important to know the goals of your buyer persona. You need to understand the measurements to create a marketing plan on how to achieve them. The same way goes for the challenges or pain points that they face and what it takes to overcome them.
Preferences and Research
Describing how your potential customers prefer to interact is necessary. You need to know if they prefer phone calls, email, or face-to-face interactions. Using your audience's language makes it easier for you to create an engaging sales experience they will positively react to.
What is a Buyer's Journey?
A buyer journey is the stages the buyer goes through upon making a buying decision. It is a part of your marketing strategy to accommodate your audience properly. This process has four stages – Awareness, Consideration, Decision-Making, and Post-Purchase.
Let’s talk about it one by one:
Awareness Stage
The first stage of a buyer's journey is to make your potential customers aware of your brand. With your content on your website and other social media platforms, you can give your prospects an idea of why they need your products and services. Although they are not fully committed to buying anything yet, it will help them identify their problems and possible solutions.
Consideration Stage
Now that the audience is aware of their pain points, their next step is to find different solutions. You must be able to provide accurate, factual, and detailed information at this stage to help them make decisions. Don't try to push your sales tricks because they're still not ready to buy anything at this point.
Decision-Making Stage
At this stage, your convincing and sales skills are going to be very handy, because your prospects are now ready to buy. It's time for you to show them why they're supposed to pick you over your competitors. The best way to do this is to prove your credibility through customer testimonials, product reviews, and live demonstrations.
Post-Purchase Stage
After you have made a deal with your customer, they will be entering the post-purchase stage. Once you have new customers, it is your responsibility to keep them happy and satisfied. These customers can be your most powerful marketing tool by spreading the word to others.
When Airbnb started, their mentor asked; what does your happiest customer look like? To answer the question they went and visited their users and asked them questions. Of course, this wasn't scalable but the insights they did get were invaluable.
They then went on to envisage the user's journey; what would give it a mark of 11/10? A private jet with a personal concert and red carpet on arrival, and a score of 1? Turning up to a locked shed. All this helped to realize their customers' persona, it's about finding out what you can about your buyers and shaping your interactions to suit their expectations.
Tips on How to Attract Potential Customers
If you're wondering why you don't have clients yet, well, you might want to consider making your brand attractive to more people. Start by doing thorough research on your buyer persona and updating it now and then. You can follow these steps to elaborate on how to attract potential customers:
Do a Thorough Research
Strong research is particularly important for start-up companies. Create an idea of what kind of customers you need for your brand. Better yet, speak to them directly and find as much information as you can to understand their goals, pain points, and challenges.
It's the best way to reach out to your target audience. An example of this was an on-demand moving company called LUGG. When they were first realizing their product and seeing if it was a good solution, the founder would go to IKEA and wait outside for people to struggle.
When a potential customer was struggling to fit a wardrobe in their boot, they would approach them saying "Hey! Wouldn't it be great if you could tap a button and a van would appear and move your stuff". Of course, over their sweating brow they would scream "Yes!", he then got them to download the app and order a mover, at which point the founder would run over to his van and come to the rescue!
Make an Accessible Document
Even if you think you’ve had enough customers, it’s always smart marketing to keep everything documented. Create a document that can be accessed by your marketing and sales team and ideally the whole company. Document the interviews with your ideal customers for the creation of your buyer personas. The more staff know about how to attract your audience, the higher your chances are to close deals.
Update your Buyer Persona Regularly
Keep your buyer persona up-to-date. There are certain things you might discover that will work to attract new customers or increase the number of loyal customers. You might also want to try networking with other businesses that reach out to the same type of customers as you do. Sure, you take the risk of allying, but this could also open up more audiences.
Conclusion
Getting your audience to trust you can take a lot of time and effort. The best way to do this is to pay attention and understand the concerns of the customers. Show them how you can offer solutions to their problems through your products and services and find out what their particular needs are by asking them directly wherever possible.
Then, when you're done creating your buyer persona, why not try Dynamic Leads to get more highly qualified leads!
