Buyer Persona

A buyer persona represents an ideal customer created through market research, which entails demographic information, background, behavior patterns, interests, goals, etc. It helps companies engage valuable clients, concentrate on qualified leads, and develop a product that will meet the needs of target groups.

In this video, you'll find more about the research-based profiles of your ideal customers.

Why are buyer personas important for your business?

Sometimes it's a challenge to build good relationships with your audience in today's competitive market. You can't refute the fact that to scale your company's growth and at the same time allocate your resources correctly, it's necessary to connect with customers the right way. With buyer personas, you have an opportunity to fully understand what goals and problems your clients have and address them properly.

Companies that manage to develop profiles of their ideal customers obtain a clear picture of the people they're trying to reach and engage. A comprehensive analysis of your client base helps you understand them and their wants. Statistics say that 90% of companies that develop buyer personas were able to get a clearer understanding of their customers.

Conducting research on your ideal customers and obtaining their characteristics can bring several benefits to your business. The advantages of buyer personas are as follows:

• help you understand the needs and interests of your ideal customers to make better connections;
• enable you to send personalized messages;
• give you the information about their preferred communication channels;
• help you generate qualified leads;
• give you a specific understanding of your target audience;
• provide a better unique value proposition;
• help you reach higher conversion rates;
• allow you to use resources on marketing efforts efficiently;
• provide you with customers' pain points and help you to overcome their objections;
• identify people you shouldn't target;
• enable you to create great customized posts, articles, and emails that resonate with your customers.

Buyer personas represent real people with specific goals, interests, and needs. Knowing your clients better is everything for your business success. Let your company leverage an opportunity to understand your target groups through several steps.

Understanding customers is essential if you want your messages to stand out in today's highly competitive environment. You can develop profiles of your ideal customers with the help of data obtained through surveys, interviews, and research. We'll provide you with several steps to create the representation of your customers.

1. Conduct in-depth research. Surveys, interviews, and phone calls can help you ask the right questions and obtain the necessary personal information on your customers. Use your opportunity to ask about their occupation, family, age, income, or location so that you can communicate a relevant message at the right time.
2. Identify your customers' goals. Your company's team should understand the motivations of your buyer personas. You should be aware of the professional goals of your clients. This information allows you and all your company's departments, especially the sales team, to cooperate in finding an approach to help your customers achieve their goals with the help of your product or service. You can relate their objectives to the solutions you have.
3. Understand your clients' pain points. Creating a detailed profile of your ideal customer enables you to determine the problems or hassles your clients are eager to solve. Identify the questions customers frequently ask by contacting your support team. Afterward, you can try to divide your clients into groups based on their challenges and provide your solution to each of them.
4. Segment your customers. Once you obtain your customers' background and demographic information, you can divide them into several groups. This process is necessary to create several buyer personas for different segments of customers. SendPulse enables you to segment your clients based on variables.
5. Design your buyer persona template. For your convenience, create a template to insert the information about each of your potential customers or use special tools that help you make those online. Fill in your persona's information to organize all the received data and use it efficiently for further communication with your clients.
6. Find out how your product can solve customers' problems. Once you know the goals and issues of your personas, it's critical to understand how your product can bring your customers to achieving their goals or solving their problems. Marketers always focus on the features of specific goods. However, there's no point in doing it if your features can't help your customers. Think specifically about each client and how your product or service can contribute to the problem's solution.
7. Prepare your sales team for communication. Interviews, surveys via phone, email, or in-person meetings help you obtain all the necessary information you can use when having a conversation with your personas. Firstly, mention several actual quotes from your surveys and interviews that contain problems of your buyer personas, who they are, and what they want. Secondly, write down all the objections that might arise during the conversation so that your sales team can address them quickly and correctly.
8. Tailor messaging. Let your team know how to talk about your company's product or service with your ideal customers. You should explain how to describe your product as a solution to your persona's problem and sell it. Make sure that your company's team speaks the same language and moves in the same direction when communicating with prospects and customers.

And now it's time to put your knowledge to use and improve your marketing campaigns through several steps.

How to Use a Buyer Persona in Marketing

Marketers like to use many buzzwords to demonstrate a product and all its features that are useless for customers. Buyer personas should remind you that you create a product for people. Thus, you need to think about the preferences of those who will engage with your brand. With an ideal customer profile in mind, you can address customers' priorities first. Remember that your marketing strategy decisions depend on your clients.

There are several steps to consider if you want to improve your marketing strategy by using buyer personas.

1. Segment your mailing list. As you already know, creating a profile of your ideal customer enables you to develop personalized email campaigns that effectively convert leads into customers. Segmentation is a perfect way of organizing mailing lists and sending targeted offers to particular customers. SendPulse allows you to divide them into groups and send relevant campaigns to deliver more value to your customers. This process will help you improve click-through and open rates.
2. Consider influencers. Influencer marketing is extremely popular nowadays. It is a good idea to identify opinion leaders that directly affect your personas. Try to partner with them and ask them to become representatives of your brand.
3. Choose communication channels. Analyze your personas to determine their preferred communication channels. With the help of this analysis, you will be able to distribute your content through the most effective channels.
4. Schedule your campaigns. Some people check their emails more actively in the morning, while others prefer to check them in the evening. Consider using Google Analytics to evaluate the peak engagement rates of your personas. It will help your marketing campaign to be more effective.

Having well-developed personas enables you to improve your marketing strategy. You can use personas to create strategies that will directly address your target audience and build trust. Additionally, an ideal customer profile enables you to improve copywriting, SEO strategies, ads, and more. Besides building trust and content strategies, personas also show which promotional campaigns to prioritize to obtain excellent results.

Buyer personas can be helpful at any stage of a sales cycle as they help you create highly targeted content. Moreover, if you take time to create negative personas, you'll be able to identify the contacts you shouldn't try to reach. This process allows you to reduce your costs spent on every lead and customer and demonstrate better sales performance.

There are a lot of various buyer persona templates over the Internet, and you'll definitely find something to your taste. The examples below will help you determine the best fit for your company.

Buyer Persona Examples

Now that you have a clear picture of buyer personas, let's review some examples.

Let's take the buyer persona developed with the help of Xtensio, for example. In this profile, a travel company can find all the required data about their customer. You can see a short bio, preferred communication channels, demographics, and background. All this information can maximize your efforts in developing the right marketing campaign and a customized message. It will help you appeal to this person, meet their needs and wants, and gain trust.

The buyer persona below represents another type of customer and was created with the help of HubSpot. This profile enables you to find out a person's age, education, occupation and responsibilities, industry, social networks, and methods of communication they prefer the most. This data is essential for your sales team during their conversation with clients. It prepares your team for all the possible objections and how to overcome them.

Simply put, creating personas is a necessary step that leads you to valuable prospects and qualified leads. Understanding your customers allows you to develop personalized marketing campaigns that will significantly increase the number of your regular customers and conversion rates.

Resources:

1. This article covers the definition of a buyer persona, types, and how to create buyer personas.
2. In this article, you'll find out the importance of buyer personas for your company and the ways you can use them.
3. This article provides a reader with a clear understanding of how to use buyer personas for better marketing.

Last Updated: 22.03.2023