Buyer Personas are a great way to get inside the minds of your target buyers. Buyer personas allow you to tweak your marketing to address those buyers’ needs more adequately, potentially increasing profits and revenue. However, many businesses don’t use buyer personas, nor do they know what they are or how to use them. If you’re one of those businesses, here’s what you need to know.
What Are Buyer Personas?
A buyer persona (sometimes referred to as a customer persona or marketing persona) is a research-based, descriptive, semi-fictional representation of an ideal customer for your business. It includes details on the persona’s demographic, psychographic, needs and pain points/annoyances. Multiple existing customers will fall into each buyer persona, and many companies create multiple buyer personas because they want to attract more than one type of buyer. These personas help businesses with their marketing strategies by using market research and data (and some educated guessing) to provide clear, real information about the desired buying audience for their marketing specialists.
Why Are Buyer Personas Important?
As mentioned before, buyer personas help marketers design their strategies based on their target audience’s needs. It’s better to start with knowing what your prospective customers want and giving that to them rather than what you want to give them. People are more inclined to associate with and buy from businesses they’re familiar with and with whom they have a trusting relationship. Showing real concern for your customers is the best way to build that trust because when they see that you genuinely care, they’ll be more likely to associate with your business.
How Do You Design A Buyer Persona?
It’s important to ask detailed questions about your target audience, particularly because it might help you see details you’ve overlooked. You might even want to send out a survey to existing customers in your quest to get a better understanding of what your target audience wants. Review yours and your customers’ answers and discuss them with co-workers. You’ll uncover issues you didn’t realize existed, and you’ll be able to figure out ways to address them in favor of your customers.
Each of your personas, however many you create, should always include basic demographics (i.e. age range, income, education, relationship status, etc.). Based on whatever approach you take (as there are multiple ways to create a persona), from here you might add more information about their profession/career (i.e. job title, industry they work in, special skills or tools they use, etc.), their general goals (life goals, career goals), and more. Note that you can adjust or swap out personas if you discover something is missing or doesn’t make sense for a particular persona.
What About Small Businesses? Should They Bother With Buyer Personas?
Yes! Even though you might think you know who your small groups of customers are, clarifying who your audience is and what the end goal should be is never a bad idea. You’ll likely find out new things about your audience that you can use to adjust your current marketing strategies, which might involve editing your website, any active ads, and correspondence (blog posts, emails, etc.) directed at customers. This information will help you relate to your target audience better. Identifying who your customers really are, what they do, and how they think can only be beneficial to both your customers and your business.
If your business needs help defining its audience, contact Barge Marketing by either submitting a form on our Contact Us page or give us a call at 614-401-8800.