At every stage in the business life cycle, decisions are being made based on who your company/products are targeting to achieve the highest profit margins and customer satisfaction.
So, without even knowing it, you have most likely already used a version of buyer profiling/persona. If you haven’t - don’t panic! In this article, we’ve got some great tips on helping you iron out your buyer personas.
Buyer Personas
Buyer Personas are fictionalised representations of your ideal customer(s) that in turn help you better understand your potential customers. If nearly all of your decisions boil down to who you are targeting, wouldn’t you say that’s a pretty important thing to get right?
Building buyer personas allows you to point out precisely the type of person who would be interested in, and eventually purchase, your goods - their age, sex, location, job, family life, hobbies, communication preference, - all information you need to efficiently tell the story that your goods can, (and will!), solve their problem.
This also applies to pointing out who you don’t want to target. Building negative or “exclusionary” personas lets you segment out the “black sheep”; someone who is too expensive to acquire, someone who is too advanced for your product, or someone engaging with you for research.
How can you use them, you ask?
Having all this knowledge about who you are targeting and how they like to receive information allows you to tailor your content and place it on the right platforms to reach your intended market or markets.
Conducting market research and gathering insights from your current customers (via reviews, interviews, surveys, etc.) is the best way to go about this and will allow you to build strong buyer personas. In addition, when personas are applied to the lifecycle stage, you can map out and create highly targeted content.
Same goes for negative personas - identifying information that will single them out from all your other customers allows for lower cost-per-lead and cost-per-customer.
How do you create a buyer persona?
As we mentioned above, market research and customer insights are key to building a solid persona. Be sure to reach out to your contacts and include a mix of customers, potential customers, and those who fit your target market (but aren’t yet contacts).
Some ways to gather this information can be through:
- Interviews - face-to-face or over the phone
- Look for trends in your database on how customers find and consume your content
- When creating forms for your website use fields/questions that will help you match them to personas
- Ask your sales team for feedback - what generalisations do they have about the customers you serve best?
Once you have all the information needed, you can start painting the picture of your buyer persona.
Using a table like this helps you clearly see exactly what you need to:
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BACKGROUND |
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DEMOGRAPHIC |
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IDENTIFIERS |
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GOALS |
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CHALLENGES |
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WHAT CAN WE DO |
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REAL QUOTES |
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COMMON OBJECTIONS |
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MARKETING MESSAGING |
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ELEVATOR PITCH |
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Table from HubSpot
Our Expertise
At ExtraDigital, we live and breathe marketing. Building personas is just a small part of our expertise - applying it to all aspects of your marketing strategy is where it really takes off. Using your personas to boost leads, attract new clients, and create loyal ones is just the beginning.
You can read more about our inbound marketing skills, or if you’d like to have a chat - get in touch with one of our team today!
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