Anyone who shows interest in your product or service is a buyer. But this phase comes in a later stage of a business. Attracting buyers, generating ROI is not that easy as it seems. To be able to lure buyers, businesses need to understand its buyers i.e. Their persona.
Ask yourself this question – Do I know my buyer’s persona? Do I know who my actual buyer is? Once you are able to accurately answer all these queries, you will succeed in taking your potential lead to the last step of the conversion funnel.
To understand the buyer, you would need to learn about your buyer’s persona.
Let us see:
What Is Buyer’s Persona?
A fictional character that you build along the lines of your research and collected data is the buyer’s persona. It is also called audience persona, marketing persona or customer persona. Creating a buyer’s persona means you build a hypothetical character and based on its needs you build digital marketing strategy, and align your organizational work. After creating a buyer’s persona, you are able to map the buyer’s journey that leads to sales and ROI.
So, now we know buyer’s persona is important to your business. But how do you build it? That is a million-dollar question. But the great news is that it is not that scary. To build a buyer’s persona, you just need to have clarity on various topics, which will be discussed as we move ahead.
Benefits of Buyer’s Persona to the Business
Creating a buyer’s persona is important because of the clarity it brings, and the foundation it forms to generating qualified leads, attracting prospects, and earning revenue. Apart from that it helps in:
- Creating valuable audience-based content
- Tailoring the final business message
- Development of product
- Meeting the customer-centric needs
- Meeting the concerns of target audience
Let me explain you with an example – Suppose your target audience is a caregiver. Do you know what are their needs, or whether your products and services are of any help to them? What are their interests and so on. To get answers to these queries, you will have to build buyer’s persona. It really works!
Do not just go by words, see the figures too
As per a case study by NetProspex, the personas result in
- 900% increase in website visits
- 171% increase in revenue generated through marketing
Data Resource Marketing Serpa
In order to develop better understanding of your buyers, you require buyer’s persona. It helps in digging deep into the psychology of buyers and knowing what exactly they want.
Remember, today the marketing is all about “What Colour You Want”, which means it is all customer-centric.
The buyer’s persona helps in focusing your marketing on your buyers. But it is also possible when your buyer’s personas are strongly based on extensive market research. The one that you conduct through questionnaires, surveys, and interviews.
You can build as many personas as you want for your business but keeping things simple should be the key. For that, all you would need is the focus on one customer persona. If you are new to building personas, it is better to start small because you can always develop more personas later on.
Beware of A Negative Buyer Persona
Buyer’s persona represents your ideal customer. It is like a shadow to the original customers. But when you start to build a persona that does not match the persona of the actual customer, it is termed as the negative buyer persona. These can be anyone who are too advanced for your product or services.
Just abstain from focusing on this group of buyers, as these won’t serve any purpose. These may confuse you and take away from your ultimate goal.
Let’s Build A Buyer’s Persona
As already mentioned above, building a buyer’s persona requires research, collecting data, and information. Different methods are used to gather all sorts of information that you may require, such as, looking through your contact’s database, creating forms and uploading them on the website, taking in the feedback of the sales team, interviewing the potential prospects and discovering their likes and dislikes.
Now, the question is, how will you use the above information collected through research to create your personas?
Once you have conducted a thorough research, you will have a lot of raw data. Next step will be to distill that information so that it is easy for everyone in the team to understand.
After that use your research to identify patterns and commonalities from the answers you have gathered. Create at least one primary persona, and share it with the rest of the organization.
Now, let us create a buyer’s persona in detail.
Fill The Basic Details
Ask your personas the basic information and fill that in the forms. The basic details mean the demographic questions. Ask these questions either over phone, or through online surveys or even in person, whichever way you and your customer feel comfortable.
You can make this conversion a bit personal too by asking habits, mannerisms or if you are observant enough, you can pick these by yourself and identify the pattern when they talk.
Guess What Your Potential Customer Might Be Looking for
In case you do not have past clients and are completely unaware of the new ones, just do the guess work here. This suggestion is for those who are utterly new in their business.
Use logics, and empathy to understand the purchase motivation of your potential customers.
Ask yourself some questions like:
- How will your product benefit your customers?
- How will it help reduce their issues and lessen their problems?
- Where are your customers located?
- At what stage your customers can buy the product?
- What is their buying behaviour and strategy?
When you get all these answers, you are able to build your buyer’s persona.
Pen Down What You Have Learned So Far
It is not a test going on. Just write down what you have understood about your customers so far. Share the information with other team members. At this point, you just have raw data. Everything might be unclear. To make things clear, you will have to declutter, which means, you need to clarify the thought process. Distill the entire information, remove the redundant part and keep only those matters.
Do Not Envy, But Learn from Your Competitors
All that you are trying to achieve has already been done before. Your competitors have already reinforced their online personas. They understand their customers’ pain points and have addressed them too. So, learn from them, look into their strategies, techniques used to market their product and service and try to apply the same. Do not copy them. Just understand what worked for them and how. Try the same and you will get started.
Learn About the Social Media Channels Your Audience Uses
This should also be a part of gathering information. Learn about your customer’s social media presence. See where they are most of the time and at what time are they most active. Many tools are available that help in gathering such insights, for instance, Google Analytics, Keyhole.co, and so on.
Identify The Pain Points
Every business strives to get ROI, generate leads and build extensive customer database. But before earning all of this, they need to give their customers something and that is their services. See what problems and issues your customers can solve by using your product and service. What is holding them back from using your product, and reaching the set goals. Look into their issues.
You definitely cannot get into the mind of your customers, but all thanks to the advance technology, you can certainly track their online behaviour and understand what they are looking for. Apart from this, you can even initiate a conversation and ask them the required questions. Also, you can engage in some social listings and social media analysis.
Reach out to the customer service team and ask what sort of queries come in. List the common queries. Identify patterns about which groups are facing what sort of issues. These will give you an indebt insight into the issues and help in building near to accurate buyer’s persona.
Understand Customer Goals
This is the opposite of pain points. Pain points are the issues your potential customers are trying to solve. Goals are the things that they want to achieve by using your product or by availing themself of your services.
Now these goals can either be personal or professional. It completely depends on the type of service or products you deal in. See if your product and service are able to match their goals and fulfil their desires? If not, then that section might not be your potential customer. This is also how you identify the buyer’s persona.
This will also help you to know your customers and create a base for your campaign. Even if the goals of your potential customers do not match the features of your product and service, this step will help you determine a lot of other things like,
- Set the right tone or approach for your marketing campaign
- Building basics
- Gathering information
Finally, It’s Time To Create A Buyers Persona
Now you know the pain points, the problems, the goals, the social media presence, the likes, dislikes of your potential customers. It is the time to create a persona.
Let me explain this creation process through an example.
Let’s say you identify a group of ladies in their 40’s who like to practice yoga. Now since you cannot talk to all the ladies, you will create a persona that will reflect the characteristics of the group you have identified. Give a strong identity to that persona. Give it a name, address, a job title, a home, a job position, and all the things that are required for a normal human being.
Remember, a list of characteristics does not make a persona. It is a realistic description of a person who represents a segment of your customers. Once you create a buyer’s persona, it gets lot easier to talk to one persona than to a whole community that it represents.
Conclusion
Building online personas are critical to your business marketing. These describe who your target audiences are and how can you reach them. Which strategies you can use to promote your product and service. Before you collect information, you can make assumption about your buyers but once you have gathered the information, do not make create any assumptions about your buyer personas. Prepare a blueprint based on everything you have in the form of data. But do not just abandon the persona at the planning phase. Take them to the next step i.e., content creation and content marketing.
