How to Incorporate Buyer Personas Into Your Business Strategy?

 

Let’s take a deep dive into the topic of buyer personas. Who are they and why are they important?

 

With modern marketing strategies being very customer-oriented, it is important to know who your customer is.

 

A Buyer Persona is a concept from Inbound Marketing Strategy, it is a fictional stereotype of a person that you create, based on all the insights you have about your ideal customer. 

There are various buyer persona templates and tools out there that will help you get an idea of the sort of information you would need to gather.

Once you have your persona’s created, you will have a clearer overview of your brand’s audience. You can then apply this insight to your marketing strategies. Focus on the social channels they use the most, talk the language they understand and solve the problems they care about! 

For example, the way you appeal to a stay at home mother is very different from how you should approach a busy business executive.

 

“The best reason to create a buyer persona is to understand your audience and what they care about so that you can be relevant to them” – Ardath Albee

 

 

How To Determine Your Brand’s Target Audience?

 

It is helpful to determine who your audience is – the first indicator is your product or service, who does it help?

Have a look at the audience section in your website analytics, what are their interests? 

If you don’t have analytics set up yet, please do it as soon as possible as the insights you can gather from it are invaluable for improving your ongoing strategy. 

The easiest opinion is to go with Google Analytics, it is free and quite easy to set up. Depending on the build of your website, you may need the help of your developer. 

Talk to your customer service team and get their input, this would be the best place to start.

It is a good idea to include your whole team in the process of determining your personas. Think about it, the customer service team, the marketing team, accounts team, they all have different experiences and different angles from they see your customer from.

 

 

How Many Buyer Personas Should a Business Have?

 

It is important to talk to each persona individually, especially if they are quite different from each other.

For example, when sending out EDM campaigns, you should segment your database based on the persona type. You should have different versions of the EDM, each targeting a specific persona. It takes just a little bit of extra effort, but that little effort goes a long way, as it is proven to be highly effective.

This would get a bit complicated if you had 100 personas There is no standard number of personas you should have, but it would be good to stick to 3-4 main personas.

 

 

There are different types of people, and also different types of buyer personas.

 

When you begin thinking about your personas, you might think about finding a generic list of universal personas. It would make your task easier as you could just pick the most suitable one and tweak it slightly, right?

Well, it’s not that simple. Each company is unique, no matter how many competitors they have. This is why their personas should also be unique. That’s why a list of universal buyer personas does not exist.

Yes, in general, personas for different companies can have the same generic categories. These categories could be for example; a Marketing Manager, IT specialist, CEO of a small company, etc. 

But the devil is in the details, they should be tailored to your business precisely.

Also, the number and types of personas your business has should be tailored to your target audience and include what you offer to your customers.

 

 

How to create your buyer persona

 

When building your buyer persona profiles, it should be based on quite extensive internal and external research.

This can seem overwhelming at first, especially if you have multiple personas. 

Remember, this does not all have to happen at once. Take your time and build it up bit by bit.

Start with choosing one target customer and build a persona around him or her. Include all the information you already know and create a plan to fill in the gaps you don’t know.

 

A good idea is to compile a list of questions to send out to the team, as I mentioned earlier, it’s great to get insight from different departments.

Here are some question ideas to help you get started:

• What kind of person are they?
• What makes them tick?
• What kind of interaction do they prefer?
• When are they most active online?
• What are their problems?
• What are their goals?

 

Take a look at your product or service – whose problems does it solve? Who is your typical customer?

 

You will probably think of a few different types of customers you have, and that’s ok. You can have multiple buyer personas. Each persona should represent a collection of similar clients, merged into this one character.

Give them a name, age and a job title.

Walk-in their shoes for a bit, try to really look into their lives and realize what problems they are facing and what their real motivations are. 

Once you understand them, you will know exactly how to appeal to them.

 

To make it easier to put this information into a visually digestible format, you can download our persona template. Alternatively, there are a lot of different types of persona templates available on the internet. Do a little search and see what suits your preferences. 

Once you have all the internal insights, it is time to get some insights from your actual customers. Include relevant questions in your customer surveys and analyse the feedback.

 

Buyers personas should be revisited occasionally as they keep changing and evolving with time.

 

 

What is a negative Buyer Persona?

 

When a buyer persona represents your ideal customer, a negative persona, or exclusionary persona, is the opposite. It is an example of the types of people you do not want for your customers.

 

There can be many reasons why you don’t want to attract certain personas. Some of them might be high-level professionals who are too advanced for your product or service. Or the opposite – they may not be ready for it, or may not be able to afford it. If all these people would end up in your database, you would have a lot of contacts that are cold leads.

It is a good idea to create a negative persona model as well, this will help you learn and determine who you want to avoid, and how to do it.

 

 

Conclusion

Buyer personas help you optimise your sales approach. They are made-up profiles that are based on a lot of internal and external research to represent your target audience. It is critical to clarify the types of people who benefit from your products and services, as it will improve your chances to attract and retain customers.

 

Other related articles to expand on the topic:

• Explaining highly effective SMART goals and how to apply them
• A Detailed Insight Into The Buyer’s Journey and How It Will Help Your Business Thrive
• Working with an Agency
• Digital Marketing solutions that help your business grow

Who are we?

MMR is a Melbourne based Creative Agency, focusing on problem-solving in different areas. We specialise in graphic design, digital, marketing, SEO and Data Cleaning.

Early 2020 we launched a new product called Livebook, which is an excellent product for publishing large scale online documents. 

 

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