What is a buyer persona and how are they used
What is a buyer persona and how are they used?
In order to sell to your customers and market your goods or services you need to know who you are selling to. The best way to go about this is by creating a buyer persona. A buyer persona is everything you know about your customers all put together in one fictional person. Build your buyer persona by listening to your customer base, collecting the feedback you gain from them from research, surveys and interviews, and understanding their decisions and thought processes. This persona represents your customers, because it is your customers, and it helps you to understand them. Once you understand your customers you can market your goods or services much more accurately. By analysing trends, behaviours, and patterns of your target audience you can identify ‘pain points’ and once you’ve done this you can identify with your customers’ problems. From there, you can start to solve these problems.
Think of your buyer persona as your existing customers and your potential customers all rolled into one. This is your way of keeping customers happy while at the same time, attracting new ones. Your buyer persona is all of these people. Having an accurate buyer persona means you can be more accurate in who you send what content out to. We are all bombarded with information and content on a daily basis, and so being able to cut straight through this and get to the right people with the right message, puts you ahead of the rest. If you think about any email campaign, you’ll see that it’s typically a blanket approach. But think about this in more detail, many of the people on the receiving end of this blanket emailing are not seeing what they want to see because it hasn’t been aimed at them. By using your buyer personas you can target the right people with the right email information. So your blanket email campaign becomes a more targeted and more effective tool. This is a segmenting of your audience into separate buyer personas which allows you to tailor your message to those particular segments.
Buyer personas are extremely important for your inbound process. They allow you to target the right people at the right time, with the right content and information, but more than all of this, your buyer personas will steer you in the right direction and show you how to help your customers. Once you have identified their pain points you can start work on them, and this means you can give your customers what they want without the problems and issues they’ve faced in the past. You can be the company who solves their problems, and to do that you need to understand what those problems are, what your customers want you to do about them, and how your customers make their decisions about who to trust and who to choose to give their money to.
Understanding the attitudes and behaviours of your customers is perhaps the key point of a buyer persona. It’s not enough to create simple profiles of who your customers are, this will only give you part of the information you need, you have to get inside their heads and their hearts and know who they are. Understand what drives them, what their concerns are, and how they make choices when it comes to deciding who they trust to solve their problems, and who they will pick to take them forward with this product or service. A detailed buyer persona will tell you what makes your customers tick, what their backgrounds are, what their livesare like. You should start with just a couple of detailed buyer personas, but as your business grows and you learn more about your customers you may have as many as twenty different buyer personas. If you think this sounds difficult to keep track of, Comurce can help.
At Comurce we help you to create and keep track of buyer personas with our buyer persona template. These buyer personas can then be shared between project boards and across departments so everyone understands them and can work with them. Keep in mind that your buyer persona, like all other areas of your business, will evolve with time and updates may need to be made at times. By using project boards to share your buyer personas across departments, everyone will be aware of changes and can share information easily. This will also be crucial once you start building more buyer personas, keeping everyone in the loop is vital to avoid confusion and mistakes.
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a culmination of all your research and data, rolled into one fictional character that represents your customer. This is your perceived customer and you can use this as reference when you want to market your business or service. Your buyer persona is the who and the why or your customer base.
Why do you need a buyer persona?
Your buyer persona helps you to market and sell to your customers because the buyer persona helps you understand who they are and what they want. Without this you have little idea of who to aim your marketing at or what your customers need from you and you’ll waste valuable time and money.
How do you use buyer personas?
When you have finished creating your buyer personas you need to implementthisinto yourmarketing strategy. Your buyer persona is your ideal customer so start developing your content and producing advertising with this person in mind. Think of your buyer persona as a guide, or a map, and then begin your journey towards your destination.
How do company’s purposes and buyer personas interact?
Your business should be led by your customer and their needs, so your buyer persona will interact with your company’s purposes by informing it and shaping it. The two things should work side by side and inter-connecting so the one informs the other and vice versa.