Are you a marketer in charge of creating buyer personas? Do you know who your personas are, and how to create them? If not, this article will provide practical insights into how you can use buyer personas to drive more qualified leads and more valuable customers to your business. The vast majority of businesses have no idea who their target market actually is, let alone what they want. And even when you do know, it's not enough — because buyers' needs change over time. Unfortunately, that fact leaves businesses fighting an uphill battle to effectively target and acquire high-quality potential customers through their online marketing campaigns. Knowing who your business's ideal customers are is a fundamental part of marketing. But where do you even start looking? What are the characteristics of your target audience? To answer your questions in this article we will be discussing some of the things you need to keep in mind while building your buyer's persona.
First to understand your buyer's persona you have to ask yourself a few important questions such as who is your ideal buyer, what are the characteristics and why should they even care about your product. This helps you to have a better idea about your target audience. On a strategic level, buyer personas help you focus your efforts by giving you a better sense of who you're talking to, and it can help you create a customer-centric sales and marketing approach. Buyer personas are vital for account-based marketing (ABM). Apart from that, buyer personas allow you to create more relevant content and make it easier to build relationships with the people who matter most. With buyer personas, you can get a much better idea of who's in your target audience and what they need from you. Therefore, to make sure that you are creating an ideal buyer's persona you have to rely on statistics and analytical marketing research, which you can get by carrying out various interviews and surveys.
As we have already mentioned earlier, for creating a buyer's persona you have to majorly rely on your marketing research by conducting various surveys and interviews. For this, you can approach some of your prospects, leads, or even those that are currently not in your contact database but can potentially align with your target demographic. If you don't have a large customer database, use resources like Meetup or Eventbrite to gather more insights on who buys your product and why. By taking their input into account, you can create more accurate buyer personas and campaigns that are better tailored to your target audience. And once you're done with your research, you will most likely be left with a good amount of raw data which can help you to uncover potential trends about your target audience. Now let's discuss some important steps that you need to take to utilize the potential of this data.
You can start by asking about some basic demographic-oriented queries by a telephonic round, or even by scheduling an online meeting(There are a lot of people who prefer this method rather than meeting in person). Apart from that, you should pay attention to some of their descriptive buzzwords, and how they are speaking while discussing your product. These small mannerisms can also help you analyze some unique personas. No matter what method you choose, the main point to remember is that personas are meant to be representative of a certain group of people. Stereotypes can be helpful when used properly—but they can also get in the way of true understanding if taken too far. So do your best to keep stereotypes out of your research, and pay close attention to any unexpected details you find as you work to create your persona. Your goal should always be for your persona to be as "real" as possible in mind and spirits.
When conducting research for buyer personas, make sure to interview a variety of people. Interviewing only people who fit the persona will result in a skewed picture of your buyer's reality. You need to get a wide range of opinions and preferences. You should also try to engage everyone you can in this process; the more perspectives you have the more developed your personas will be. For example, you might find that some of your less happy customers have bigger teams and need greater collaboration functionality from your product. Or, you may find they find your product too technical and difficult to use. In both cases, you learn something about your product and what your customers' challenges are. To get the best results for your time, make a list of these target interviewees and compose questions you could use to learn more about their needs. Before you conduct your interviews, it's a good idea to have a list of several different types of people to speak with, so that you can be sure not to miss out on anyone who might not share the demographics of your current customers.
If you have already made a detailed description of your buyer's persona, share it with your sales team to help them easily identify potential customers. Be sure to create a formal document or template that they can fill in when they're on the phone or face-to-face with someone. And make sure that everyone on your team is sticking to the same persona so that no one inadvertently makes assumptions about a customer. And, always try to include questions that can define the characteristics of your audience, so that it can give your team a better sense of who their customers are. If a member of your team hasn't had the opportunity to meet with a customer in person, they can still get a feel for who they're selling to and continue the conversation.
Take the time to develop your research persona and you will be better equipped to craft conversations that connect. You'll leave people with a better impression and get more useful, honest feedback in return. For each of the personas that you come up with, consider creating a set of questions to highlight what's important to your target persona. These questions should help you uncover new insights about the industry, as well as highlight any potential objections and concerns. This can serve as a starting point with which you can lead a conversation with a salesperson. Your sales team will be far more successful if they have more information about your buyer. They will be able to communicate more effectively and tailor their pitch to the specific needs of each prospect, rather than relying on a generic pitch that may not resonate with everyone. Creating your buyer persona(s) and boosting your sales team’s knowledge of who they are and what they want will give you a competitive advantage.
Crafting your message is important in the sales process. Once you've identified your buyer persona, you should focus on how to talk to them and how they will talk about your company. This will prevent product managers and sales teams from creating their own messages that cause confusion and miscommunication with leads, prospects, and customers. While you don't have to hard code these messages into your website, social media profiles, or advertising, this information could be very handy for sales team members when pitching directly to leads or prospects.
For creating an effective buyer's persona, you have to give some attention to looking for the ideal people for the interviews and surveys. Conducting these interviews will help you to get a brief idea about the likes and dislikes of your target demographic. Therefore let's discuss some of the things that can help you find those qualified interviewees.
The best person for you to interview is someone who is a customer of your product, but not a customer of your competitor's product. You want someone who is truly loyal to you and your product. This means that the person won't feel like they need to hide anything during the interview process. They will, in all likelihood, be willing to tell you about their interactions with other products. Generally, any participant in your survey will do. However, you might want to look for customer behavior that matches what you see in customer types. Your customer data will be the best place to find them. You can also use services like SurveyMonkey and Polldaddy to create surveys. These tools offer a variety of templates (surveys) that you can use as-is or modify according to your needs. Look through your sales records and see if you can identify a few questions for someone who has made at least three high-ticket purchases. If you're having trouble finding them, reach out to your marketing team. They should be able to help. Once you've identified some great customers, it's time to get those interviews scheduled.
Find the right people to talk to. Your contact list is a great place to start. You can easily leverage any lead's data you have available to find contacts who are likely to be your target persona. Then, prepare to speak with them in a way that's engaging, natural, and relevant--and try not to be too salesy or "sales-driven" when doing so. You're conducting research interviews, after all, not selling anything. The research phase is critical when building effective buyer personas. To ensure that you're not missing any important information, your best bet is to conduct on-demand interviews with individuals that have not bought your products yet or might not know about your brand. For this, you can try approaching your current leads and prospects, which you might have acquired from your generation forms through your website.
Apart from your customers and your prospects, you also need to take some of your references into consideration while building your buyer's persona. This can be very beneficial especially when you are looking forward to entering a new market if you don't have a reliable customer base yet. In such cases, it's better to use your networks which might include your colleagues, some previous customers, social media contacts, and so on. However, you should now have some background information about your current customers, which will help you drill down into further research about your buyer personas and discover what their problems are. A purchase journey map will also give you more insight into where users drop off in the buying process, which means you can refine it as well — a great way to save yourself from future headaches down the road. If you don't know where to start, you can also try searching on LinkedIn for people who may fit into your target personas and see which results have any connections in common with you. Then, reach out to your common connections for introductions.
Your persona is a living document and will not go unchanged for long. The more people on your team that can speak to prospects as if they were your persona, the more cohesive and productive your outreach efforts will be. So, it's good to have regular touchpoints with people who aren't part of your core team—this way you'll know when someone speaking as if they were your persona doesn't sound quite right (or like themselves). It's also a good idea to anchor any changes you make to personas with customer data. We hope that you found this helpful and that you will put these techniques to good use. We would love to hear about any interview techniques that have worked well for you in the past, so if you have any stories or tips, please share them in the comments below.