Act, make mistakes and learn: three verbs that take on special importance when designing buyer personas in the IT sector. Act to create, make mistakes to rectify, and learn to grow. If you are a technology company and you are thinking of carrying out an Inbound Marketing strategy, it is essential that you know what are the most common mistakes in its design. Solving them can significantly increase the number of conversions and, consequently, the growth of your company. Are you ready to know them?
Most common mistakes in the creation of a buyer persona
Getting off on the wrong foot does not usually bring good results, and this happens in any aspect of our lives. The definition of the buyer persona is the first step we take when we undertake an Inbound Marketing strategy. Creating a good potential customer profile is synonymous with starting to take the first steps on which to support our content. Working and stopping to think about it is essential, so we must be aware of the most common mistakes that are made when designing buyer personas in the IT sector:
- Generalisation: I mean making something general. Buyer personas are archetypes of ideal customers of a service or product, so the more specific they are, the better they will adapt to the profile we are targeting. Generalisation is a term incompatible with this figure, and the fact is that valuable content, as one of the pillars of Inbound Marketing, must arouse the interest of the target audience. Defining socio-demographic data, as well as specific information about their behaviour and online, personal and professional behaviours, will lead us to identify a specific potential customer.
- Asking the wrong questions: The creation of the buyer persona is based on the answer we give to a series of questions focused on the personality of our potential customer. For example
- what does your buyer persona do?
- what are their main challenges?
- how does he/she behave?
- where and how does he/she look for information?
- what are the issues that concern him/her?
If you don't ask the right questions, the customer profile won't be right either. We won't be creating the right buyer persona and, as a consequence, we won't achieve the expected results in the Inbound strategy.
- Focusing only on current buyers. At this point, we can ask ourselves: What sense would it make to focus on any other type of customer than the current one? It is logical to ask this question. However, there is a fundamental reason to focus beyond current customers. There is no doubt that the people who buy our services are very valuable, but, perhaps, so are those who buy products or services from our competitors.
have you ever thought about that?
- Extreme confidence in perceptions. We often blindly trust market studies that reflect a complex reality. We stick to the data, some professionals would say. In the same way, we think we know our target audience perfectly. When creating buyer personas in technology companies, it is essential to doubt everything we read, as well as the beliefs we have established. Why? For a simple reason: excessive confidence in what sometimes does not let us see beyond, so we limit the field of our buyer personas. This is something really tempting, something we should avoid as far as possible.
what can we do to avoid these mistakes?
First of all, we must stay focused on our goal: to create the most appropriate buyer persona to target the type of customer who really needs us. This will form the basis of our valuable content. In this way, we must avoid the mistakes we have just mentioned, mistakes that we can fall into without too much difficulty.
To avoid generalisations, we can start by giving a name: "Maria, director of the technology company". A next step could be to explain how she behaves and what she is concerned about, for example: "She looks for and reads information about new technologies that she could incorporate in the company where she works".
In the same way, it is also interesting to talk to people who are in the upper or middle part of theconversion funnel , as this will allow us to obtain new approaches and not make the mistake of focusing only on current buyers. The field can be much wider and we should take advantage of it. To avoid making these mistakes, we can create a help file where the profile characteristics are perfectly integrated: name, professional and personal situation, demographic data, behaviour, objectives, challenges, goals, and professional attitudes.
We have reached the end of this section, but we have not yet told you what is the most important point to avoid mistakes in the creation of the buyer persona of your technology company. The most important thing when developing a content strategy is to be very clear about who are the users of our product or service. This is an essential impulse to develop the methodology on which Inbound Marketing is based.
Nowadays, there are Inbound Marketing agencies that specialise in creating and defining buyer personas, which can be of great help in obtaining optimal results for companies in the IT sector.
why is it important to create the right buyer persona?
In a nutshell: because it contains the essential information to know what kind of people we are targeting with our content. From there, we can undertake a good strategy in which we can ask ourselves how the content we are creating will help our audience.
Thanks to the creation of the buyer persona, many technology companies manage to attract their potential customers by converting them into sales opportunities and, ultimately, into promoters of their company. And not only that, the buyer persona allows them to identify their concerns, interests and how and where they seek information about it.
IT companies should invest time in creating this profile, and as a result, they can personalise and improve each user's experience, as well as the conversion results of your technology business.
it's never too late to rectify! It's never too late to learn!
