Imagining a character can be whimsical but not if the character is inspired out of a real-life person. A buyer persona needs the same amount of energy and attention as your other relationships. A successful relationship would be one in which you try and understand how the other person is feeling and what they expect out of you. A buyer persona resembles your significant other and you; being a business, you need to see the world through their eyes to sell your product.
The inbound marketing strategy relies heavily on buyer personas to formulate marketing plans and content ideas. If you are someone who is looking to expand your business and acquire long term leads, then developing buyer personas will give you a lot of perspectives.
This blog post covers:
- What Is A Buyer Persona
- Why Should You Develop A Buyer Persona
- How Do You Develop A Buyer Persona
- How Is A Buyer Persona Useful For Your Marketing Team
- How Is A Buyer Persona Useful For Your Sales Team
Let us begin by defining a buyer persona.
What Is A Buyer Persona
HubSpot defines a buyer persona as a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. It stems from market research, real data about your existing customers and a few intuitions that come from experience in the field. You will better understand your audience and engage with them the way they want you to.
When you identify buying behavior, geographical constraints, demographics and income graph of your customer, you will be able to build a sales and marketing strategy around this. This is your best way to ensure success and build a long-lasting relationship with your customers.
Why Should You Develop a Buyer Persona
By now, you already have an idea as to why buyer personas actually matter and how you could use them to your advantage. Having a buyer persona sketched out with details gives you a great analogy to better place your products. It’s easier to build a buyer persona rather than understanding each region’s buying behavior. You will be ready to give the buyer exactly what they want and who doesn’t like getting the perfect product for themselves!
Here are few points highlighted for you.
Demographic Information
When you know where they live, how old they are and their education, you can prepare content that better targets them. The more relatable and relevant your content, the more your audience loves you.
Lead to Watering Holes
You will be able to better understand where your ideal customer consumes their content and which impacts them the most. For example, if your audience is working in finance, you need to make your presence felt on credible channels of communication such as a financial magazine, blog or TV. You can invest more time there rather than newspapers or entertainment channels.
Set Goals
When you understand your audience goals, you will be better able to ascertain your long term and short term goals. Since you understand their wants, your marketing budget and product customizations will work accordingly.
Reveal Pain Points
Your product in some way is going to be of help for your audience and you need to identify what their pain points are. What are the challenges they face every day which your product could make easier for them? For example, you sell mattresses and your buyer complains of backache, you can provide them relief solutions and sell your mattress as an option for this problem.
Help in Content Creation and Distribution
As mentioned earlier in watering holes, your buyer personas will help you come up with content ideas that are specific to them and you save a lot of time on speculating content ideas that won’t be relevant.
Build a Relationship
Since you identify with your buyer persona and your content is more relatable to them, they automatically develop a trusting relationship with you. You address their pain points and provide solutions for them which makes them feel important and satisfied. So, developing a buyer persona helps you understand your customers better and serve them better.
How Do You Develop A Buyer Persona
First, you begin by conducting extensive market research.
When you understand your industry, you explore why your existing customers are your customers. You must reach out to both the negative and positive customers to get fair feedback.
Other than your own customers, you must reach out to your prospective customers as well. You already have their contact information, so you can easily connect the dots on who will buy from you and who won’t.
Referrals are your next option if you don’t have any leads or existing customers. You use your connections to find the right people you want to target. If nothing, you’ll have some great interviews with insights.
Second, you speak with your internal team.
Customer Support Team and Sales Team are the ones dealing with your customers on a regular and personal basis. Approach them to understand customer questions, doubts, and feedback, so you are able to address these issues in your strategy.
Also, ask your sales or customer service team for their personal feedback on clients so you are better able to conjure an ideal customer character.
Third, now that your research is in place, you enquire about the following things:
- Personal information about their gender, religion, where they live, etc
- Job title of the company they are working in and who they report to
- The Company they are working for and how it is performing
- Channel of communication they prefer for content consumption
- Shopping habits based on income and factors that influence their buy
- Challenges they face in their day to day activities
How do you use your research?
Add all the information you have onto relevant categories in your buyer persona template. To make things simple for you, we have put down an easy persona template that you can use to create clearly defined buyer personas.
How is Buyer Persona Useful for Your Marketing Team?
By now you must have guessed that buyer personas are especially important to the Marketing Team. They help in designing and executing marketing strategies by giving them a direction to follow. If your audience is well defined, the job to grab attention becomes easier.
Here is how marketing uses Buyer Personas:
Lead Generation And Conversion Planning
It will be easier to generate leads because you would not waste time in targeting the wrong people, and actually be addressing the real pain points. With the information collected, the conversion strategy can be very specific.
Content Ideas And Distribution
The marketing efforts can be channeled in the right way because you know what your audience wants to read and what channels do they consume content from. You won’t be spending too much time coming up with content ideas because you will be addressing the concerns and interests of your buyer personas.
How is Buyer Persona Useful for Your Sales Team?
The sales team is the only team in your organization that directly communicates with your buyers before they buy, and can provide the best insights on what the buyers expect and what makes them happy. By developing buyer personas, the sales team has a clearer picture of who they are dealing with. They get to know about their common pressing issues even before talking to them. This helps them go well-prepared.
Establish Rapport with New Customer
When a new customer has approached your sales team, the first impression is everything for your company. Either the buyer is going to be impressed or never give you a chance again. When your sales team is aware of the pain points of your buyer persona, they will be better able to relate and guide them. They will have the exact message to deliver, and the real solution to their problems.
Maintain Rapport with Existing Customers
Your existing customers should be placed in the highest regard because the toughest part is keeping your customers engaged. When the buyer persona is defined, the sales team can work better in understanding what will keep customers interested and loyal.
Building Trust
This is the core element around which a sales team works and strategizes. Trust doesn’t come easy and it can break with the smallest detail that won’t suit your audience. And, if you don’t have the trust of your audience, you have nothing. The sales team can ensure that trust is established with the customers, and there is nothing for them to worry about, based on the information of what your buyer personas are worried about.
Ending Note
The concept of buyer personas also indicates that it should keep evolving just like an actual human does. When you have collected more information about your audience, you should update your buyer personas accordingly. Once you have updated, you should refer to them when creating content, telling relatable stories, setting the message tone, etc. Every company should have their buyer personas defined and must include the marketing and sales team for contribution.