How To Create A Buyer Persona: A Step By Step Guide
Buyer Personas are a fundamental and crucial aspect of any inbound marketing strategy. Clearly defining your business’s buyer personas can help you understand current and future clients much better. This will allow you to customize content to their needs and preferences, develop products and services to fit their personal narratives, and better address their concerns.
Furthermore, creating buyer personas allows you to personalize marketing efforts to your ideal audience, tailor messaging and other communication, and filter potentially ideal prospective leads from dead ends.
What Is A Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is defined as a semi-fictional research-based description that depicts your business’s ideal customer. A buyer persona consists of all the best characteristics of your best target customers. Buyer personas help obtain valuable insight into your audience’s current and prospective consumer behavior. Furthermore, creating detailed buyer personas can help guide product development, coordinate cross-departmental organizational teams, attract more valuable prospective sales leads, and save time.
Businesses then use this carefully created buyer persona as a model customer while creating content and drafting promotional communication. Your business can then further create buyer personas for each individual market segment. Research shows that 71% of companies that exceed lead generation and overall revenue goals have detailed documented buyer personas.
Benefits of Creating Buyer Personas
1) Understand Your Customers Better
Creating and using buyer personas allows your business to gain a deeper understanding of its customers and their purchasing behavior. By understanding your current audience’s needs, preferences, demographic information, preferred communication methods, and consumer behavior, you will be able to connect with them more appropriately and target more valuable future prospective sales leads. 82% of companies that used buyer personas were successful and effective in creating quality value propositions.
2) Segmented Marketing Efforts
One of the biggest benefits of creating buyer personas is the ability to segment marketing strategies and campaigns. Segmenting marketing efforts can enable your business to personalize and customize your content according to each buyer persona. According to HubSpot, personalized emails can improve clickthrough rates by 14%, can increase lead conversion rates by 10% and can generate up to 18 times more revenue than non-personalized communication.
3) Higher Organisational Efficiency
Properly targeting your business’s ideal demographic can prove to be difficult and expensive. However, with the use of buyer personas, your organizational sales and marketing team can target the right group of people without wasting financial and human resources. This will increase your company’s efficiency and overall productivity in the long run. Research shows that targeted buyer personas can increase sales leads by up to 124%.
4) Sales and Marketing Tool
By creating a comprehensive description of who your business’s target customer is, your sales and marketing team can create content that targets them more easily. If your sales and marketing representatives are aware of a customer’s preferences, needs, consumer behavior, and other personal demographic information; they can obtain a much clearer understanding of who they are selling to and how to do so. Studies have shown that the creation and usage of buyer personas can account for up to 90% of a company’s overall sales.
Steps To Creating Buyer Personas
1) Review Existing Audience
Researching and analyzing existing clients can help you determine who the final decision maker in certain notable purchases was, who your sales and marketing team’s point of contact is, what that person’s specific job title is, and much more. Looking through your database of existing contacts can help you discover significant trends about how certain clients consume content and their specific purchasing behavior.
To uncover more data about existing clients, you can interview certain customers that have the best shopping patterns that you would like to replicate in the future. From this research, you can discover commonalities amongst your business’s most profitable customers which can help you create a more accurate buyer persona.
2) Define Your Target Customer
To create detailed and accurate buyer personas, you must first clearly define your company’s ideal target customer. Your business needs to analyze each person you interact with during the sales process and buying cycle. Your business can do this by segmenting its current audience into multiple segments depending on buying patterns and consumer behavior.
You should particularly focus on your business’s currently most valuable customers such as clients with repetitive shopping habits and who spend larger amounts of time viewing and engaging with your content. Furthermore, you must be careful not to develop too many buyer personas as this can lead to over-segmentation and can eliminate the simplicity that creating buyer personas can offer.
3) Research
Researching your current and idyllic target audience can help you obtain valuable insight into consumer preferences and purchasing behavior. You can collect data related to existing customers and clients by examining recently received customer feedback, monitoring sales representative opinions and responses, and inspecting social media networks and content distribution platforms for noticeable trends.
Once you have gathered enough information on existing clients, you must then determine who your ideal customer would be in the future. Your business can discover this by searching for gaps in existing prospective leads, observing where competitors receive the most success, and your company’s long-term future goals and objectives. Finally, your business can utilize analytics to determine which demographics are most profitable for your particular industry. This can help you target the most valuable prospects with your future content.
Once you have clearly defined who your ideal customer is, you must collect data from people that fit those specific descriptions. When questioning customers that fit your buyer persona characteristics, you should ask for simple demographic information such as their job title and income as well as specific preferences they may have during an interaction with a business.
4) Segment Buyer Personas
Now that your business has collected all relevant information related to existing customers, you must organize and categorize the collected data and information. Then, look for similarities between the collected data and the previously decided ideal characteristics of your target customer. This will help categorize potential leads into sets of distinct and comprehensive buyer personas.
Furthermore, your business must decide how many buyer personas will be required to target your industry’s most profitable market segments. You can further segment your buyer personas by job title which can make the overall sales process much easier than ever before. If your company does business with clients from multiple different industries, it may make sense to segment buyer personas according to different industries. This is because buyers from different industries typically have different buying patterns and long-term goals and objectives.
5) Create Profiled Personas
One of the biggest benefits of creating buyer personas is that it can help your business communicate with and sell to customers in a more personal manner. Therefore, the first step to creating profiled personas is naming your ideal buyer persona. You can then further decide your buyer persona’s age, job title, industry, income, hobbies, and future goals.
This will help your content creation team create more individualized, distinctive content by viewing your semi-fictional ideal persona as a real prospective customer. This will also help you understand your buyer’s wants, needs, motivations, and goals; which can help you target them more productively and efficiently.
Once you have decided on your buyer persona’s basic demographic information, you should create a short narrative description profile describing your buyer persona’s story in depth. This will make it easier for your sales and marketing team to understand your ideal customer and tailor content and promotional communication to them.
6) Determine Your Buyer Persona’s Personal Narrative
Now that you have created profiled personas of your ideal clients, you must now determine the role of your buyer persona both within their job as well as in their day-to-day life. By determining your audience’s organizational tasks and personal interests, you can create content that caters to and fits into those roles.
You must then determine how your business’s product or service can help them improve these royals and help them achieve their goals and objectives. For example, a prospective client’s goal for using a particular product or service could be to increase their organizational efficiency or revenue volume. If you are aware of your buyer persona’s long-term goals and objectives, you can tailor and customize your content and marketing strategies to satisfy those wants.
While creating buyer personas, your business must also determine what challenges your ideal customer is currently facing and what is preventing them from achieving said goals and objectives. Once you have obtained these common challenges, you can present your business’s products or services as solutions to these issues.
7) Ensure Accessibility of Buyer Persona Information
Buyer personas are almost completely useless if they are inaccessible whenever they are required. Your comprehensive buyer persona data and information should be available to everyone within your organization’s sales and marketing team so that they can be used to better communicate with clients during customer interactions and create more targeted content which addresses their personal motivations and preferences.
8) Create Personalized Content
Once your business has carefully crafted its buyer personas, you can now use this newly obtained information to personalize and customize content and marketing campaigns to your market segment’s ideal customer. Now, you must acquaint your organization’s sales and marketing team with the drafted buyer personas, create content that caters to the preferences of your buyer personas, target them on their preferred content distribution platform or social media network, address their specific goals, future objectives and current challenges and adjust existing content that does not cater to your new buyer personas.
Buyer personas can help your business obtain valuable insight that can be leveraged to increase engagement, sales, and overall organizational revenue. Therefore, you must use this information to your benefit and tailor your content marketing strategy to accommodate them.
Social Media Platforms You Can Use To Research Your Audience
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Twitter Analytics is an extremely useful tool to help research your audience on the platform. Twitter Analytics allows you to see which tweets were received better than others over a given period of time, download data related to the number of retweets your business account received and the impact and engagement of your advertisements. Twitter also enables businesses to search for keywords for specific locations and times, which can help you target certain demographics more productively.
Facebook has a wide variety of available analytics that your business can use to learn more about its audience. Facebook Analytics allows businesses to view metrics related to the engagement and reach of specific posts and advertisements. You will also be able to automatically view segregated demographics of people that regularly view your content.
LinkedIn is one of the most important social media platforms that your business can use to research your client’s professional demographic information. LinkedIn Analytics can provide extremely crucial information such as the ranking of seniority of your business’s connections and followers, the company size and function of the company’s your clients are from and the industries that make up the largest percentage of your overall audience.
Your business can also access some of the analytics from Facebook through Instagram Business Analytics Tools. Your business can use Instagram to determine how many people view and engage with your Instagram posts and stories on a daily basis.
Furthermore, you can access key information such as the days that your audience interacts with your content the most, which specific locations are most present in your overall following, and which age groups. You can also use Instagram to research the efficiency and potency of hashtags and keywords without having to use a separate paid keyword research tool.
Create Buyer Personas To Take Your Business To The Next Level
Developing comprehensive and holistic buyer personas has a wide variety of potential benefits for modern businesses. Buyer personas can help you understand your current audience on a deeper level as well as determine who your ideal client is. This will ultimately help you improve content engagement rates, increase sales and ultimately maximize revenue volume.
