What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is also known as a customer persona or marketing persona. It is crucial to determine the right buyer persona to engage the most appropriate customers in your website. An ideal persona is the perfect description of anyone who represents your target audience. Of course, it is not a real person, just an imaginary fictional character who bears most features of your customers.
A buyer persona does not carry the characteristics of one individual, but a mixture of features that reflect the mainstream of your customers or potential customers. Therefore, in some cases, it may be necessary to create multiple personas to cover the most diverse customers’ profiles.
Personas represent real people with a background, culture, and goals. They are your various target customers in need of your product.
Why you need a buyer persona
Regardless of your business type, whether it’s a small business, a start-up, small-to-midsize business (SMB), or an enterprise, you need to create a buyer, marketing, or audience persona. Your buyer persona is your foundation to support your business and allow it to expand and grow.
Having your buyer persona in mind every time you consider a new marketing strategy or campaign is helpful. You will reach better decisions that will satisfy the needs and demands of your customers. Planning your approach around your buyer persona will achieve a good relation with your customers, which in turn, will increase your sales and customer trust and loyalty.
Your buyer persona will help you: pick the right message for your target audience, reach out for them and keep them engaged on your website, communicate more effectively on social media. Help you realize how customers use your website and what they expect to gain.
Your buyer persona will also help you avoid some pitfalls. For example, not to waste time and money on trying to attract the wrong customers who cannot afford, nor need your product or service. You can be more competitive if you focus on a specific target group. Decide how to best design your website and where to spend your money.
Your persona should be designed on data accumulated from user research, web analytics, and real customer interviews so that you can make more sound marketing decisions.
How to create the ideal buyer persona
The more time and effort you invest in your creation the more benefits for you. It requires good organization and social skills.
- Set out with thorough research.
Depending on the product or service you sell, it is important to know who your main customers are. Are you addressing the general public or a specific group? Who are your users? Why they choose your product?
Collect information about your customers or potential customers. You should include: age, location, interests, education, and social status, spending power, specific needs, decision makers are just a few points to consider. The information you need depends on what you sell and how you want to sell it. What motivates users to engage in your website? Find out how long they engage in your website, how often they log in, how they use your product/service. Even the software or devise they use may be of some significance.
The information may be retrieved from your customer database, social media, and communities they use. There are tools available to let you know where your customers spend their time online and allow you to contact them. So, you can reach out to them through activities or promote your campaign there.
Study the data you collected, and look for various tendencies. Find who your best customers are in terms of revenue. Using this information you know who your target audience is.
- Know your competitors
To engage more customers, you need to draw them away from your competitors. Use available tools that will provide you with the information you need.
- Seek to find what holds your customers back
It is crucial to know what potential customers and/or competitors have to say about your products or services. It is important to find out how they feel about your products, what they like or what does not meet their satisfaction.
Your customer service can provide you with such information as they handle the questions and various obstacles. They know what exactly your customers expect from your products or services. Actual quotes can help you create a more realistic buyer persona.
Another way of approach is to have customer interviews. It is crucial to have questions well-thought-out, concerning your product or service and the goals you wish to achieve. Reach out to your customers either by phone or email. Allow them to express their opinion about your product or service. Getting feedback from your customers will help you realize what customers expect from you.
- Offer better customer assistance
Once you become more acquainted with your customers, you know their needs and expectations. Then you should focus on your customers’ satisfaction. Look at your products and services from your customers’ perspective. People buy your product to serve their purpose. Understanding the reason for their purchase your buyer persona will help you see what you actually offer.
Include your new customers as well. What was the reason they switched over to your product? Understand their priorities and how they assess the value of it. You can focus on what people value most about your product, which in some cases it might not be what you considered important.
You know your products and services like the back of your hand. Now it’s time to realize how to make everything easier and more convenient for your target customer. Accept negative feedback just as well. Know the reasons why they stopped or never used your product. You can create a more effective strategy to engage or even win back dissatisfied customers and increase conversion rates.
- Time to be creative
Look at all your data you have compiled. Write down similar characteristics under the same category. Use a spreadsheet to record your findings, it simplifies your work. Now you have a good picture of who your target customers are. You have the pieces of the puzzle for your exclusive buyer persona. Isolate a basic customer group. Turn this imaginary pool of individualities into a persona you can relate with.
Do not try to cut it short. Do not make up your buyer persona by just guessing what it may be like based on some data. The right buyer persona is your best customer.
Be creative make your buyer persona seem real. Give your persona identification, a family, a home, a ‘life’. Once this character takes shape, gets a name, has hobbies and interests, then everything falls into place making it so much easier for you to understand the demands and buying habits of your target audience. You may even give your persona a face, a figure, using images available online.
In other words, create your make-believe customer. Doing so enables you to be more creative and productive in your marketing strategy. It may even be necessary to create more than one buyer persona, as your products or services aim at different people and have different purposes.
An ideal buyer persona must be a representative customer. Of course not all your customers will be a perfect match. But next time you check your customer data before making a decision, you will not be looking at figures and graphs. The data in front of you will have a personality you can identify with.
How a buyer persona can help
Having the ideal buyer persona in mind, you can build new more effective strategies. Your persona determines your course of action and leads to an increase in your sales and customer trust. It will bring positive results and reward you for your effort.
Let everyone know your buyer persona
It is important for people in your business who will use your persona to have the necessary description and information. Explain how your buyer persona can be of use, your approach, give customer examples.
Why not create an image/illustration for your personas. Display them in places where decisions are made, after all a buyer persona is an imaginary depiction of the real target audience.
Conclusion
To drive more customers to your website, you need the right messages and marketing strategy to reach each one of them. Buying personas are your tools to achieve your goals. Invest time, effort, and money to carry out thorough research to create personas designed on real customer awareness. Your buying persona provides you all you need to know for better marketing and product promotion. It is not as difficult as it may seem to create the best buyer persona for your business. Do not hesitate to ask professional assistance for your creation.
