The concept of buyer personas is not new. But it is certainly gaining a great deal more attention these days as businesses shift their focus to online inbound marketing.
When you begin to develop content to attract the right kinds of leads it becomes apparent very quickly that you need to have an understanding of customers goals and aspirations - not just demographics.
How to build a buyer persona to drive sales and profit
Let's start with what a Buyer Persona is.
A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal target customer (built on real-world buyer data). The Persona helps you understand the characteristics, behaviour and motivations of your target audience to enable you to create a strategy and the content to attract, convert, close and delight them to build your profit.
Well-researched Buyer Personas give you insight from your customers' perspective and not only inform your marketing and communication strategy but also help you view your product or service from their perspective.
They give you the ability to assess whether your products or services and the way they are accessed and used, truly solve your customers' problems or needs. And if they don't you're armed with the insight to improve your offering to better address your potential customers needs and grow your business.
According to Tony Zambito, the performance improvement can be as much as 25% year on year in addition to increased customer retention (up to 10%) and improved ROI on content marketing.
Robust buyer personas are built by researching
- existing customers
- prospective customers, and
- seeking insights from your sales and marketing teams who deali with the customers directly
Demographic information (age, industry, geographic location) can't reveal the 'why' of a buyer's decision-making. You need to understand their psychographics - their goals and aspirations. What drives their buying decisions?
How do you create Buyer Personas?
- Define your ideal target customer(s) - these should be the most profitable target customers. Now is a good time to define who you don't want as customers.
- Determine the questions you want to ask that will help you understand their decision process.
- Survey and/or interview current customers, prospective buyers and your sales and marketing teams.
- Anaylise your findings - look for patterns that reveal the answer to the question 'why'.
- Look at your transactional data or other useful data – are there patterns that help explain why decisions were made to buy?
- Build your buyer personas for your most valuable prospects/customers. If you haven't done any before then between 1 and 3 is plenty - at least until you've fine-tuned the personas and reviewed your products & services, marketing strategy and communication tools with this new insight in mind.
- Check your personas with people who ‘know’ the personas. Do they need tweaking?
- Integrate these personas into every aspect of your business - every staff member needs to 'know' your personas - that way you know that every touch point those personas have with your business will be consistent with what they want.
- Build your inbound marketing strategy with these personas in mind - using the information they want, the language they use, the places they hang out and the understanding of what will help you develop their trust.
- Review your personas regularly. Build persona questions into your sales and marketing data capture process and update them regularly to improve the accuracy of your personas but also to reflect any changes in the market, products, trends and social influences.
For a step-by-step explanation of how to build a Buyer Persona download our free e-book
How to create buyer personas
You don’t want to attract any stranger to your website - who will bounce within seconds. You want to attract the right strangers - the ones who can be nurtured into customers.
Download our step by step guide to creating your buyer personas.
