Understanding your clients is important. As a business owner, you, of course, know that in order to sell a product you need to know who's buying the product so that you can target the correct people. But there's a difference between knowing the kinds of people that could potentially buy your product, and understanding the goals, challenges and motivations of those people in order to customise a unique and specialised marketing strategy that draws them in.
In simple terms, this is the difference between a target market and a buyer persona.
What Is A Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a story of your best customers and leads, founded on market research, customer feedback and external studies. It contains information that lets you understand the details of your customers and what attracts them.
With a buyer persona, you can understand the following:
- The challenges of your customers
- The goals of your customers
- The responsibilities of your customers
- How your product helps your customers
- Where you can find your customers
- How to communicate with your customers
- The demeanour of your customers
- How educated your customers are, both in general and specifically to your industry
- The hobbies and interests of your customers
And much more…..
What Does A Buyer Persona Achieve?
A buyer persona allows you to plan a specialised, truly effective marketing and sales strategy based on a deep and thorough understanding of how your best customers feel, think and behave. Thanks to this better understanding, you know exactly where you can find your best customers, what kind of language they will react too, the best ways to encourage their engagement and much more.
Buyer personas will give you a focal point to tie everything back too. Every piece of content you create should be cross-examined with your buyer persona to make sure it's designed for optimum ROI. When stuck for ideas you can return to your buyer personas for potential content ideas that would draw them in. And when something isn't performing as well as it should be, you can compare the content to your buyer persona to see where you can improve.
You don't need to limit yourself to one buyer persona. There's a good chance you have a range of diverse customers so you can segment them into different buyer personas. This will allow you to be specific and personal with each of your potential clients instead of trying to force them to consume content only one group will enjoy.
How To Create A Buyer Persona
To create a comprehensive and ultimately useful buyer persona, you need to go beyond just guessing what your clients want and think and instead find significant research. A great place to start is by surveying your current customers. They decided to use your product so if anyone has an understanding of what attracted them it's themselves. Ask them questions about how your product helps them, what made them decide on your product over others, what challenges they faced when deciding to buy your product and include more personal questions such as their education level and interests.
As well as talking to your existing customers you can look at research that has been published by separate organisations. If you can find the results of an external survey or test then you will be able to create a non-biased and therefore, more accurate buyer persona.
When writing your buyer persona, try to create a story rather than just listing features. This will make it more emotive which will, in turn, make it easier to create content with the correct message.
Rather than:
- Female
- Mother of 2 young kids
- Works from home
- Struggling to manage job and parenting
- Needs weekly planner to better organise her time
Try writing:
Lucy is a mother of 2 young children. She works from home but has been struggling to juggle both her job and making sure she gives enough time to her children. She thinks she would benefit from a weekly planner as she can't seem to organise her time efficiently and hopes being able to clearly segment her time would help.
The second option makes your buyer persona seem like a real person with real issues. It makes it much easier to empathise and create relatable useful content.
If you want help in creating a professional and effective buyer persona or simply want to learn more, the JDR Group can help guide you through the process of researching and writing great buyer personas. Contact us via our website or call us on 01332 343281.
