You have a lot of leads but don’t know how to convert most of them into buyers?
You’re a company that wants to make the most of their marketing?
You’re struggling to properly focus your marketing efforts on the right target?
In this post you’ll find out how to create a buyer persona that will help you attract the right leads and convert them into happy, paying customers. Once you know what goes in there and what’s the purpose of it, creating your buyer personas becomes a simple process.
Defining a buyer persona, also referred to as a customer persona, audience persona, or marketing persona, helps you create content that better targets your ideal customer. This means more leads and sales with less effort.
When it comes to your marketing, it’s easy to get lost in the details of tracking your latest engagement rates and campaigns. Buyer personas teach you about your audience’s wants and needs, and how to put them ahead of your own.
A buyer persona is an in-depth description of someone who represents your target audience. This is not an actual customer, but a fictional person who has the characteristics of your best potential customers.
You will assign to this customer persona a name, demographic details, interests, and behaviors. You’ll have to eventually learn to understand their goals, pain points, and buying patterns.
You can also give them a face using stock photography. Some companies even create cardboard cutouts of their buyer personas to make them feel like a real presence within the office, and constantly reminds them of who their target is.
The purpose of creating a buyer persona is to learn how to think about and speak to this model customer as if they were a real person. This makes it possible for you to create marketing messages targeted specifically to them. Your buyer persona will be at the center of everything: from product development to your brand’s voice to the social media platforms you use.
Different categories of people will buy your products for different reasons. So you’ll probably need to build more than one buyer persona. You can create a customer persona that matches each segment of your client base.
But no worries: start with just one buyer persona, and pick the most promising one. You’re always welcome to add more buyer personas later.
Quite often, marketers use corporate-speak and too many buzzwords that don’t really mean anything. Buyer personas will help you avoid this type of practice by reminding you to consider the real humans who read and engage with your marketing content. To make your job easier we’ve created a buyer persona template you can download here, and put your info inside while you follow along with our article.
Buyer personas keep you focused on your customer’s priorities instead of your own.
Consider your buyer personas every time you make a choice regarding the goals of your marketing strategy. Does a new marketing campaign cover the needs and goals of at least one of your buyer personas? If not, you have good reason to start your plan from scratch.
Create your social media strategy with the purpose of helping your personas meet their goals, and in return, you’ll build a connection with the real customers they represent. It’s all about increasing sales while creating brand loyalty and trust.
When it comes to social advertising, you can find incredibly detailed targeting options. Once you define your buyer personas, you can craft social media ads that speak the language of the target audience your persona represents.
You can create separate ads for each of your defined buyer personas. This comprehensive level of targeting increases conversion rates and improves the success of your social media ad campaigns.
When you create a buyer persona you make it easier to connect your business objectives to your target audience, and thus increase your ROI. To keep track of your results you should be careful of three aspects.
Content: What kind of content will connect with your buyer persona?
Channels: What marketing channels, social media platforms, etc. does your buyer persona use most?
Data: Good data allows you to monitor your efforts, report on your success, and adapt your strategy accordingly.
In this way you will see exactly how much you get from using the right message, for the right audience, at the right time.
Gather your information as you work through the following steps. And to make it easier, we’ll be creating a buyer persona for a fictional product and company, Gordon Internet Security of Gordon Security, and our buyer persona for this will be a head of an IT department at his company, as our product deals with the B2B sector. For illustration purposes, we used GETitOUT.io to enter the relevant info you’ll see in the following parts.
Your buyer personas should be based as much as possible on real-world data. Here’s a basic look on how to learn more about your audience. A good starting point is to compile data on your existing customers and social audience – if you already have them. If you’re a new business you’ll need to start from scratch.
Consider details like:
For B2B, also consider the size of the business and who makes purchasing decisions.
You can gather this information from social media analytics, especially Facebook Audience Insights, your customer database, Google Analytics and by making “educated guesses” based on your own research and insights.
Learn which social channels your audience uses and discover what they’re talking about. You need to reach your customers using the right means and the right channels. You can start by figuring out where they already spend time online.
Check out the competition. Take as much information as you can from the customer research your competitors have already done.
As an example we’ve created a buyer persona for a head of an IT Department using GETitOUT, so we can have all the info we need in one place. And remember: the demographics – while quite relevant – are the least important part of a buyer persona. Does it really matter if your customer is 26 or 27 years old? Not really. The following parts we’re going to talk about in this article are much more relevant in building the right marketing strategy for your target group.
Click here to create your buyer persona on GETitOUT.io as well.
Pain points are specific problems that potential customers of your business are experiencing. And like any problem, customer pain points are as diverse and complex as your prospective customers themselves.
What pain points are your potential customers trying to solve? What’s holding them back from reaching success? What barriers do they face in getting to their goals?
One good strategy to find out is to engage in some social listening. Setting up search streams to monitor mentions of your brand, products, and competitors gives you a real overview into what people are saying about you online. You can learn why they enjoy your products, and which parts of the customer experience are not so great.
It’s also a good idea to collaborate with your customer service team as well, to see what kinds of questions they get the most. Figure out if they can help you identify connections between target groups and the different types of challenges they face. You could even go as far as to ask them to collect real customer quotes that you can use to help give your audience personas depth.
If you’re just starting up, you can go on search engines and try to search what your audience might search. For example if you’re selling travel bags, you could search for reviews, forums where people talk about their experience with different travel bags and so on. Or you could simply come up with your customer’s responses metaphorically, in the case where you don’t have any clients yet. Look on Reddit or Quora to search for the topics of your industry.
Another thing you could do is to search for the frequently asked questions related to your industry on Google. Customer reviews and feedback are also great sources of pain points inspiration.
For the example we used on GETitOUT we searched for things like: “security concerns for business”, getting the following results:
– “best antivirus for my business” – here we found out about the competitors and why people choose them. It is a good idea to Google each one of them to find what the users of their product currently struggle with when using it. This may or may not be turned into a pain point depending on how you can relate it to a problem the customer is facing.
Based on Google research and industry trends we came up with the following pains for our buyer persona. If you want to create your buyer persona using GETitOUT as well, click here.
This section is the flip side of pain points. Pain points are issues your potential customers are trying to solve. Goals or aspirations are positive things they want to reach. Those goals might be personal or professional, depending on the types of products and services you’re trying to sell. What motivates your customers? What’s their end game in all this?
These goals can be closely related to solutions you can provide, but they don’t have to be. This is more about getting to know your customer base than it is trying to match customers exactly to features or benefits of your product.
Your persona’s dreams and goals are important even if they don’t relate closely to your product’s features. They can form the basis of a campaign, or they might simply set the tone or approach you take in your marketing.
Your sales staff talk to real people who are considering using your product. They have a good understanding of what your customers are trying to achieve. Ask them to collect real quotes from their calls, so you can later use them for your marketing strategy.
In our case, since the company was a newly founded one without prior sales, we tried to figure out the goals by doing research on the companies who might fit our criteria of buyers, or build them directly using the pains as inspiration. When you know a pain you can do research on that and find out how people relate to it, or how they currently deal with it. They might simply choose to live with it, or maybe they found some incomplete solution to their problem. Your job is to find out the clear goal of this category of people and how they envision their life without this pain.
For example, while searching for goals we googled “cyber security concerns for businesses”, and we discovered that one of the main goals of companies in terms of cyber security is to keep data leaks from happening, especially through the process of cloud jacking. So we’ve turned that into a goal for our buyer persona example.
If you want to create your buyer persona using the GETitOUT tool as well, click here.
Now that you know your customers’ pain points and goals, it’s time to paint a clear picture of how your products and services can help them. As part of this step, you’ll need to stop worrying about your company in terms of features and analyze the benefits you’re offering to your customers.
It can be quite difficult for marketers to get out of the feature mindset, which is one reason buyer personas are so important. They help you turn around your thinking and consider your products and services from a buyer’s point of view.
A feature is what a product or service is or does. A benefit is how your product or service improves your customer’s job or life. Ask yourself three main questions for each of the pain points and goals you’ve collected:
How can we help? Capture that in one clear and simple sentence.
What are your audience’s main buying barriers? And how can you help overcome them?
Where exactly are your followers in their buying journey? Are they just researching or ready to buy? Reading reviews?
Again, speaking with your colleagues who deal directly with customers, or calling them yourself, can be a great way to learn all these. It can also be a good idea to consult your customers and social media audience directly through a survey.
Now, gather all of your research and start looking for common points. As you gather all those characteristics, you’ll have the foundation of your unique customer personas.
Let’s assume you identify a main customer group of fathers in their 30s who live in big cities, like to camp, and own motorcycles. Great—now it’s time to take this seemingly abstract collection of characteristics and transform them into a persona that you can identify with and speak to.
Give your buyer persona a name, a job title, an industry they belong to, and other similar characteristics. You want your customer persona to appear like a real person.
Aim for approximately the amount of information you would see on a dating site. Or what you might find out from a short conversation on an airplane or at a bus stop. And most importantly: don’t forget to include pain points and goals.
Remember, a simple list of traits and characteristics does not equal a buyer persona. A customer persona is a realistic and believable description of a person who represents one particular segment of your customer base, which includes demographics, pains and goals.
Sure, not all persons in this customer group match the characteristics of your persona exactly. But this persona represents this customer group to you and allows you to think about them in a humanistic way rather than as a collection of data.
As you create your customer personas, be sure to describe both who each persona is now and who they desire to be. This allows you to start taking in consideration how your products and services can help them get to that place of ambition. To help you with creating your buyer persona, we’ve created a simple template that will ease your process. Download our buyer persona template here.
As a business, you want to attract the leads and customers with the best outlook for our business, right? You want to get to the people most likely to become long-term customers and advocates. Knowing who these people are, and their similar characteristics enables you to tailor targeted marketing to them. It gives a clear direction to your marketing strategy.
For small businesses, it can help you adapt your entire business strategy. For example, you could be offering music lessons from a website. After a while, you could realise that your best-paying customers are middle-aged men wanting to learn the guitar. You would then focus your copywriting, blog posts, video tutorials and other content on this specific category of people.
You might notice things you have never thought of about your target audience. This information is not just relevant to marketers – it can affect everything from writing high-converting copy to developing better products. Align this information across the organisation.
It is important to use these personas across your organisation and marketing funnel. Buyer personas can also help your sales team build rapport with potential clients, through better understanding what the prospect is dealing with and coming ready and prepared to address their concerns.
Customer support teams can use personas to better serve your customer base. When they understand their problems better, your team can empathise with them.
Product development can also use buyer personas when building product roadmaps. Personas will help them identify and prioritize changes to your products and services based on what your customers need the most.
One of the benefits of using buyer personas is that you have a better return on marketing investment. It helps you make better decisions regarding the channels you should focus your marketing on. Your marketing becomes more personalised to these individuals, and you learn how to target a more specific market segment.
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