*Click here to view or download the How and Why to Create Buyer Personas PDF.
Do you know who your business’s buyer persona is? Social Sally. Website Wally. Transportation Tammy. IT Ian.
As a business, your time and resources need to be spent promoting your business to the right people at the right time. This is the key to scaling growth and keeping new client acquisition costs down.
Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers that are based on data and research. Well-executed buyer personas create a clear picture of exactly who you are trying to attract and serve. Before you can begin refining your strategy to match your ideal customers’ preferences, you need to document your persona(s) in a way that’s visible and actionable. Remember, your business can have more than one buyer persona. Don’t get carried away, though. Start small and expand.
There’s a number of characteristics that you need to consider when creating your buyer persona. These characteristics include:
- Age
- Level of education
- Social networks used
- Industry
- Job responsibilities
- Goals or objectives
- Biggest challenges
- Whom they report to
- How/where they get information
- Tools they need to be successful
Having a deep understanding of your buyer persona(s) is vital to driving relevant content creation, product development, sales follow-up, and anything else that relates to customer acquisition and retention. As a result of creating your buyer persona, you’ll be able to attract high-value visitors, leads, and repeat customers to your business.
How to Create a Buyer Persona
To create your ideal buyer persona, you will need to conduct research, interviews, and surveys with a mix of customers, prospects, and contact databases that might align with your target audience.
Let’s take a look at some methods for gathering the information you need to develop buyer personas:
Research
- Take a look through your contacts list to reveal trends about how certain leads or customers find and consume your content and products/services.
- Learn which social channels your audience uses. If your content is on Facebook and your client base is on Instagram, you’re missing the boat.
- Check out the competition. What are they saying? How are people engaging with the content? What are they NOT engaging with?
- Conduct surveys with your potential and current customers to reveal the characteristics previously discussed like age, social networks, industry, biggest challenges, etc.
Identify customer pain points
- Conduct interviews with your leads and customers to determine what they like best about your products/services. These interviews could also be used to reveal what problems your products/services resolve for your potential and current customers. By “interviews” we mean simply asking questions. A quick text or phone call can give you a ton of information without intruding on your client’s day.
- What do they feel is holding them back from succeeding?
- Look to your sales team for feedback on the leads they interact with. What generalizations can they make about the different types of customers you serve?
Identify Patterns
Now that you’ve conducted your research, it’s time to put this information to use. Identify patterns and consistencies from the answers to your interviews and surveys to develop a primary persona. Then you will need to share the persona with the entire company.
How You Should Use Your Business’ Buyer Persona
Reframe your business from the customer’s perspective.
- Buyer personas can help to avoid the trap of using “corporate-speak.” A lot of buzzwords that don’t mean anything to your customers.
- Buyer personas keep you focused on addressing customer priorities over your own.
- Build brand loyalty and trust with real customers by developing your social strategy based on helping your personas meet their goals.
Target your social ads more effectively.
- After creating your buyer persona(s), you can generate social ads that speak directly to the target audience you wish to reach.
- In order to increase conversion rates and improve social ad campaigns, you can create separate ad content for each of your defined buyer personas.
Talk to your customers.
Now it’s time to condense the information you learned from conducting your interviews and surveys.
- What keeps your persona up at night? What motivates your potential and current customers? Tie all of this together by telling your target audience how your company can help them.
- It is important to give your persona a name to allow everyone internally to refer to each persona in the same way and allow for cross-team consistency.
Sales Interactions
- Create a list of objections customers may raise to your sales team so they’re prepared to address them during conversations with prospective customers. This can be created by using data from your interviews and surveys.
- Train people on how to talk about your products/services with your persona. For example, start with the general pitch that positions your solution in a way that resonates with your persona. Finally, get down to the actual language your sales team should use to connect with them.
Now that you know a little about buyer personas and how to create them, it’s time to get to work. Think about your buyer persona(s) every time you make a decision about your digital marketing and overall marketing strategy. Do right by your persona(s) and you’ll build a relationship with the real customers they represent. In turn, you will boost sales and brand loyalty.
