As a digital marketer, when you implement an Adwords campaign, do you target anybody and everybody without any thought or do you target a specific audience. The former relies on luck while the latter relies more on logic and research. Relying on luck will not take you anywhere when marketing is concerned. It is better to conduct your own research and have your goals aligned before launching a campaign. Plus you need to know exactly who your target is, and this is where buyer persona comes in.
What is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional description of your ideal buyer. This persona is built using information from the real world, primarily using information provided by real customers. The buyer persona represents an ideal customer and it tells you how and what prospective buyers think and do. You can anticipate buyer decisions and understand the psyche of your customer by developing a buyer persona or several buyer personas based on different factors. Buyer personas are more than simple descriptions of buyers. Since you are now aware of buyer’s expectations and how their problems are solved by marketers, you can align your marketing strategy accordingly.
Using a buyer persona you will be able to delve so deeper into a customer’s mind that you will be able to build a relationship with your customers that will be your competitors’ envy. The more detailed your persona is, the better will be your results. Not only will it help you increase your revenue in the long run but it will help you focus your time and energy in the right places, eventually leading to attracting the most valuable customers to your organization.
Why are Buyer Personas Important?
Buyer personas are important for marketing and here are a few reasons why:
1. Strategy: Buyer persona helps B2B organizations to strategize better and align their goals accordingly. Buyer personas help marketers to keep up with changing tastes and preferences and how their own goals are changing as well.
2. Common Ground: Developing a buyer persona gives you the scope to understand buyers and develop a common ground for them where you can interact directly. Buyer personas help you to overcome different barriers and focus on the primary goal of helping buyers and fulfilling their needs.
3. Performance: B2B companies who implement buyer personas have outperformed competitors simply because they have knowledge about their customers which their rivals do not possess. If you want to develop a customer oriented company then you have to have customer personas to help realize your dreams.
4. Globalization: Every company dreams of globalization nowadays irrespective of their size and buyer personas help break these barriers when they are entering another country’s market. Even if the company has little knowledge about the people there, creating buyer personas will give you very little room for any error whatsoever.
Buyer personas help you understand what type of content you need to prepare, and states the nature of your marketing campaign as well. Basically buyer personas help you focus and realize the necessities of customer satisfaction. Along with a sense of understanding, your campaigns will bear the mark of relevance and every marketing strategy will be more effective.
How to Create Buyer Personas?
You can create buyer personas by conducting interviews, surveys and thorough research. Your best bet would be to create a pool of customers, prospects and people outside your existing database. A few ways to gather required information would be:
1. Go through your contact database and conduct research to reveal how leads behave on your website and how do they consume your content.
2. Depending upon which persona information is the most important for you, you can ask that field-specific questions in your forms on your website so that you can get maximum information regarding that field.
3. Try to find out what the sales team has to say about your leads. They must have some kind of information that will help you form generalizations depending upon the customers they have served over a period of time.
4. Conduct interviews over phone or in person to know more about a customer’s choices and what do they like or dislike about your product.
In order to find interviewees for your research, you have to reach out to a number of people from varied backgrounds. You can always choose to establish contact with some of your loyal customers who have been already engaged by your company. Ask questions to both customers who were satisfied with your product and those who were unhappy with it. If you only ask questions to any one group then you will not be able to build the perfect buyer persona. It is important that you know what both groups have to say and make it collaborative in nature. Interviewing your own customers actually prove to be easier than outsiders because they are already interested in your company.
But interviewing customers only won’t be enough. Be sure to balance out your process by throwing in a few prospects in the pool. Prospects are usually not well-informed like customers and they help you create the persona in a more realistic fashion because you will be using that persona to nurture leads as well. Along with that if you interview a few referrals or outsiders who are not part of your database but fit your customer profile, you will have concrete information to develop a persona suited to both your customers and your needs.
Now, to gather information for the buyer persona, you need to ask certain questions to these people. Some of the few common questions that you should include in your own list should be:
- What is your job type?
- What skills are required for your job?
- How much time do you spend at your job?
- Which industry do you work for?
- What are your job goals?
- What are your personal demographics? (Age, marriage status, children, location etc.)
- What are your educational qualifications?
- How do prefer to interact with sellers?
- Do you research before buying a product?
- Describe a recent purchase that you made.
These are a few types of questions that you can ask, you can add more depending on which field is more important to you.
You have to realise that through these questions you will be trying to understand customers’ and prospects’ goals, behavior and preferences.
You can now use the data that you have gathered and distill that data to identify patterns and generalizations that will help you develop the persona. You will be able to develop a primary persona and then you can modify that pattern according to different customer groups.
Marketing personas will help you connect with your audience and help you improve your marketing. When you have all the required personas ready and on-board, you’ll be able to prepare different marketing content for different personas so that customers can identify a sense of relevance in the messages that they receive from you.
What kind of experience do you have while creating your marketing persona? Do you need help developing your buyer persona? Feel free to drop us a line and we’ll be happy to help you out.
