If you were asked to imagine your perfect customer, who would they be? What would their customer profile look like? What are their shopping habits? Or their values and interests? I know its a lot to think about, but these are the types of questions you need to ask yourself to develop a solid buyer persona profile.
Buyer persona’s are a powerful tool that help businesses better understand their target customer. When a business uses buyer personas, not only do they gain a deeper understanding of their customers, but they are also able to make more informed business decisions. When there is a clear understanding of who you are selling to, it's easier to make important decisions about budgeting, marketing and sales tactics, and even hiring.
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a profile that businesses create to represent their ideal customer. The buyer persona is created based on market research and actual data about existing/current customers.
Completing a buyer persona profile forces you to really learn about and dig deeper into your ideal customers. To start, you should try to gather the following information about your ideal customer:
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- Demographics
- Background information
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- Job titles, and/or the size of the company
- Companies they work for/own, or interact with
- Stakeholders
- Identifiers: Buzzwords or Mannerisms
- Values: customer acquisition cost, lifetime value, closing rate, chance of buying again, cross promotion of other products
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Let's create a buyer persona!
You can use this HubSpot tool to familiarize yourself with the buyer persona development process. Customize the profile to include all information that will help build a connection with this persona, such as, their goals and objectives, their biggest challenges, who they report to, how they measure success, etc.
Tip: When developing a Buyer Persona profile, include as much information as possible.
The more detail you include, the more effective this tool will be to make informed business decisions. It is always better to have too much information, than not enough.
How do Buyer Personas relate to marketing?
Identifying a buyer persona creates structure and context for a business, providing guidelines for planning content and allocating resources. Understanding your ideal customer allows you to design marketing initiatives specifically around what will resonate with them, thereby increasing the overall effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
What does this mean for the client?
As consumers, we want to feel seen and understood by companies and brands. Often times, our favourite companies are the ones that take note of our behaviours, interests, and characteristics, and use that to deliver value to us. Developing buyer persona profiles is one way that companies can actively try to understand and connect with their ideal customer. Making this effort allows your customers to develop a more personal connection with your brand, creating an overall more positive experience. When using buyer personas, your brand and marketing tactics are more effective because they are meaningful to customers who resemble the buyer persona profiles you identified.
What is the benefit?
Buyer personas can have a huge positive impact on your business. As mentioned earlier, identifying your ideal customer in the form of a buyer persona takes some of the guess work away from marketing and sales initiatives. By having this information handy, you can skip the trial-and-error phase of targeting, and instead, reach your identified audience right away. Not only can buyer persona profiles help organize and streamline many business functions, it's also useful in creating personalized, relevant content for specific audiences.
Proof that Buyer Personas actually work:
- Website traffic can increase by as much as 210% when you use buyer personas (marketingsherpa)
- Behaviourally targeted ads are 2x more effective than non-targeted ads (Network Advertising Institute)
- Buyers prefer personalized experiences, in fact, 48% of buyers are more likely to consider companies that use personalized marketing tactics to address their specific issues (ITSMA)
- Of the companies that exceed their lead and revenue goals, 93% use buyer personas to segment their contact database (MarketingInsiderGroup)
- Organic search traffic increases by 55% (marketingsherpa)
If you're thinking you might need a little help with your marketing and/or determining your buyer personas, look no further! We'd love to chat about how we can help you, send us a message today.