A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customers informed by research and marketing. Knowing your business’s buyer personas will help you focus on products that meet your target customers’ needs and align all departments so that they focus on customers who are likely to convert and remain loyal to your brand.
An in-depth understanding of your buyer personas will also inform your content development strategies, sales, marketing, and customer acquisition processes. Creating your buyer persona is easy. You only need to have an accurate representation of who your ideal customers are through research.
Here is a step-by-step guide on how to create your buyer persona.
Types of Buyer Personas
Each business has unique buyer personas and no two similar business share buyer personas. As a business, you should give your prospective buyers a unique name so that you can easily remember them.
Notably, there isn’t a standard for choosing or identifying a buyer persona. Each business is unique, and so are the buyer personas. Moreover, there isn’t a naming standard, and businesses can give their customers unique names.
Whether you want to name them as ‘indecisive Jane, ’ ‘working mom Mary,’ or ‘IT rep Tom’ it’s totally fine. Other companies will use a naming system such as ‘customer persona,’ ‘marketing persona,’ or ‘target persona,’ and all these are fine.
Why are Buyer Personas Important for your Business?
Are buyer personas important? Can my business run without defining my buyer personas? Here are the benefits of buyer personas for your business.
Help you understand your Customers better
Understanding your buyer personas will help you create content, personalised messages, and products that meet their needs sufficiently. The products or services you develop should also consider your target customers’ behaviour patterns and pain points.
Personalised marketing
Most brands make the mistake of sending the same message or email to target customers regardless of their position on the buyer journey. Having well-defined buyer personas can help you personalise marketing strategies. You will manage to categorise your customers according to their personas and unique characteristics and then market to them using personalised approaches. Doing so will help you generate more leads, sales, and revenues.
Segment negative personas from your contact list
What’s the point of wasting time on customers uninterested in your products? Negative buyer personas represent people you don’t want as your customers. These could be people interacting with your content for learning purposes only without the intention to buy, customers who are too expensive to acquire, or those who are too advanced for your offerings.
Just as you take time to identify your buyer persona, it’s crucial also to segment negative personas from your contact list. Doing so will help you achieve a lower cost per lead and, consequently, higher sales.
Steps on How to Create a Buyer Persona
The most important thing when developing a buyer persona is research. You need to look through your customer contact database to discover how customers find you and any similarities with those customers.
Another way of finding customer information is through contact forms, where you will ask customers for specific information to discover more about them for easy categorisation.
Now that you know how to find data, the next step is to sort out and create your buyer personas.
Step 1: Identify your Persona’s Basic Demographic data
Find out as much information as you can about your potential customers. These include name, contact, age, location, gender, occupation, and income. Here you also want to detail some unique behaviour of your customers so that any person in your company can easily identify them.
Step 2: Identify your Persona’s Motivations
Your persona’s pain points are their main motivations. You want to identify why your customers want to use your services or products. You will then capitalise on this knowledge to ensure that you deliver services or products that meet their unique needs.
Step 3: Prepare Hypothetical Conversations to Help Your Sales Team
Ensure you develop questions your sales team can use when conversing with your target customer. Ensure you explain who the customer is, what they want, and their concerns.
Step 4: Personalise Messages
You want anyone in your company to use the same language when speaking to different types of personas. Thus, you need to create personalised messages that any team member can use. While doing this, include any specific vocabulary your audiences may prefer.
Step 5: Give a Name to your Buyer Persona
Finally, give a name to your buyer persona so that every team member refers to them the same way for consistency.
Creating a buyer persona is crucial for businesses looking to achieve low costs per lead and higher sales. The above steps will help you create an effective buyer persona so your business can personalise content creation and marketing efforts.
