What is buyer persona and why do you need it
Introduction
After many decades, people are still talking about buyer persona. It is unimaginable for any organization to neglect buyer personas considering its benefits. It does not matter if the organization is engaged in B2C or B2B marketing. Below are the definition of buyer persona and importance to your business and marketing strategies.
What is BP (a Buyer Persona)?
A buyer persona is not all about profiling your customers. It provides insight into what customers think and steps they would take to find a solution to their challenges which of cause your company might be offering. It gives insight into the attitudes and criteria that made potential customers or buyers to choose your business or competitors over you.
Your buyer persona may include things about your customers like hobbies, demographic information, family size, and career. Things that your marketing team needs to create a specific marketing plan.
How to define BP
Many see buyer persona as a mere description of buyers. But profiling buyers to create buyer personas is more than that. A lot has to be considered. Your buyer persona should be guided by your marketing principles otherwise you may end up with too many details that will be more confusing.
If done correctly, you can through the buyer persona tell what buyers or customers are thinking about initiating a business deal with you. And you will also have sound knowledge to make certain marketing decisions and plans that will turn things around. You will be able to change your email marketing strategy, content marketing, and sales plans to a tone that matches that of your customers or buyers.
Analysis methods
Anyone can prepare buyer persona whether you have a business or not. You are going to conduct in-depth research and fill in some data yourself. A little-educated guesswork might be of help during the process.
Creating buyer persona – Online Business
Those whose businesses are online can get information that will help them create a buyer persona using simple tools. Below are examples of tools they can use.
- Facebook Insights
- Google Analytics Audience Reports
- Survey Monkey
Facebook Insights is helpful if you already have your Facebook page created. Google Analytics Audience Reports, on the other hand, provides rich information on demographics and psychographics of visitors that visit your website.
You can understand more about personas psychographics of your customers through the use of survey monkey. Another way besides using Survey Monkey is to call your real customers directly. Those who were bold enough to do business with you are the type of customers to relate to. Know what motivated them to buy from you, so you can be more effective when communicating with similar customers.
Creating buyer persona – if you don’t have a business
You can still create a buyer persona if you don’t have a business. Though the method is different from the previous one, the results are almost similar. Your focus at this level will be to monitor your biggest competitors. The information you will get from your competitors when tools like SimilarWeb is used will enable you to fill in those blank spaces when creating your buyer personas.
Also, visit your competitors’ social media and blog pages. Check their profile to know more about things that make their services unique. Check each and every person that leaves a comment on posts both on social media and blogs to get more information that will enable you to create buyer personas.
Buyer Personas Templates
There are dozens of templates online. But using the tool above, you will be able to get information to fill in the blank spaces below.
- Location
- Gender
- Age
- Interests
- Background
- Relationship status
- Interested In
- Language
- Buying Motivation
- Biggest Fears
The last step after filling up the required information will be to generate names and images for the buyer persona created. You can get pictures of others, but it has to be for personal use only.
Why BP is important for marketing
A good marketing strategy or one that focuses on targeted buyers in today’s ad-heavy world is what counts. Unfortunately, many companies have spent huge revenue on marketing strategies that produced low ROI at the end of the day.
Buyer personas will help your marketing team to understand how your targeted customers behave or think. They will have a better idea on how to approach them and create marketing plans that are more specific.
You also might want to read more about Twitter Analytics.
Through buyer personas, you will discover what motivated your customers to do business with you and improve more on that angle. This will keep you ahead of your competitors and make more buyers develop more interest to do business with you
Conclusion
Information gathered from a buyer persona can be used to increase leads and prevent you from spending on marketing campaigns with low ROI. You can almost predict the outcome of every marketing campaign with an actionable and detailed buyer persona. Though many consider the process to be tedious, the outcome is worth it.