The key for any company that wants to succeed is to have a well-developed marketing strategy. Marketing has to revolve around the customer. Does anyone know of a company that can sustain itself without them? Therefore, our strategy will be developed around our audience. Every well-defined audience requires the creation of a buyer persona.
what is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a semi-fictitious representation of our ideal customer. It indicates, among many other things, the objectives, behaviours and decision-making processes of your potential buyers, taking into account specific socio-demographic data and information on aspects such as their online, personal and professional behaviour and their relationship with the company offering the product or service.
In the end, it is about putting ourselves even more in the shoes of our target audience and finding patterns in consumer behaviour, as well as identifying sales opportunities and their more specific interests. Each ideal consumer profile for our company is known as a buyer persona.
One of the most important characteristics for the buyer persona is the so-called pain. Although the term "pain" may seem inappropriate, in reality we call this any need, motivation or concern that the buyer persona has and that can be solved when purchasing our product or service.
The role of the buyer persona in an inbound marketing campaign
When we define the buyer persona, unlike when we choose the target, we make a segmentation based on the need that the product or service is trying to cover. Therefore, the marketing strategy should be developed according to the implicit benefits of the product, regardless of whether the need is for men or women, young or old, upper or middle class people.
You do not sell a product or service to your buyer persona through its characteristics, you must also complement it with what these characteristics will bring to the customer, which is why it is a crucial link in the inbound strategy.
How to create a buyer persona
After understanding what a buyer persona is, you will have to be guided by the profile of your typical customer. In other words, you will have to let yourself be guided by the majority to answer some questions that will help you define the behavioural profile of your buyer persona. These questions will help you to get to know your potential customer better.
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8 questions that can help you create your buyer persona:
- what is your job?
- what tools do you use?
- what industry do you work in?
- what are your responsibilities?
- where do you look for information to learn about your job and what is happening in your industry?
- what social networks, groups or communities do you belong to?
- how do you prefer to communicate with suppliers: email, phone, in person?
- what was the evaluation process and why did you decide to buy it?
The next step is to design a step-by-step customer profile based on the answers you obtained, so that you can unify the information and elaborate the persona in a document available to everyone in the company, so that they can benefit from the study you did.
- Your buyer persona profile should include:
- Name of the Buyer Persona (Fictitious)
- Gender
- Age
- Occupation
- Level of education
- Means of communication used
- Goals and challenges of the buyer persona
what should you take into account when creating your buyer persona?
It is very important to do a good job of investing time and effort in defining buyer personas. Achieving our marketing objectives will depend on this work being done correctly. Therefore, in the process of creating your buyer persona, bear in mind three important aspects:
- The buyer persona is dynamic: don't consider the job finished at any point in time. In most cases you will be completing the description over time, as well as adjusting details as you progress in your knowledge of the customer.
- You don't need a complete description to start working with your potential customer: you can launch your marketing strategy with the minimum and expand and revise the description as the project progresses. The most important thing is that you don't stop improving your buyer persona. Follow the evolution of your product and your customers.
- The details matter: keeping your ideal customers in mind and understanding their concerns or pain points, along with their profile, will help you build effective buyer personas. Draw your ideal customer with everything you have collected, in a clear and practical format, understandable to your team and the rest of the company.
Here we leave you the link so you know what mistakes are usually made when designing the buyer persona, so you can identify them in your strategy and improve them.
Main advantages to meet your objectives
Buyer personas help companies in an infinite number of daily tasks. Here are some of the reasons why buyer personas are more important than ever:
- It helps to better understand your target audience: usually, this is done through generic interviews conducted by the marketing or sales areas of a company. On other occasions, they are of a specific type. Whether it is one or the other case, the objective is to better understand the customer's profile.
- They guide your sales and marketing strategies: this means that we must know better the interests, concerns and pains of our potential customers, as well as the socio-demographic data that help us to create content on the topics to be addressed.
- They inform about market strategies: consumer behaviour changes so fast that sometimes we do not have time to answer all their questions or solve all the problems that arise. Buyer personas help us to adapt to the evolution of the market, anticipating what each of them needs at all times.
- They multiply benefits and minimise efforts: finally, when the work of identifying our buyer persona is well done, the resources that we then use in other strategies will be optimised. We will not have to act with uncertainty and the risks of these actions will be minimised.
Companies that create buyer personas prove to have a much better reputation than their competitors. Why? They simply take the time to understand each customer in a unique and personalised way. They carry out a deep analysis of their buyers to treat them in the best possible way. In turn, buyer personas also guide us in writing content or creating landing pages due to the segmentation that we carry out by creating buyer personas.
They provide us with information on how to address them. I'm sure you have asked yourself: Do I write as you or as you? Am I more technical or more practical? Should I call them on the phone or should I write them an email? All these questions are answered when we create our buyer persona.
