What Are Buyer Persona and its importance?

More than 60% of internet users research the products online before buying them or making a purchase decision. How a brand or product is positioned or identified by the customers is crucial. It influences their decision to buy it or go for the competitor. Hence, knowing what exactly a buyer persona is & creating and developing an excellent buyer persona is critical for running a successful business.

You must understand the audience that you are targeting as a businessman or a marketing expert. Your brand positioning should be impeccable. You need to offer a product to your target market that the customers want. Knowing who you are marketing to is extremely important. It helps you to get your message heard and effectively reach your target audience.

To achieve all that, you need to create a great and successful buyer persona. Many companies and businesses are lagging in utilizing the tools to know more about customer knowledge and preferences. A buyer persona is among those tools. If used correctly, it can be a crucial tool to ensure that you target your correct audience consistently.

What Is a Buyer Persona?

In simpler terms, a buyer persona is a detailed and specific profile of the target customers. It is a blueprint of the ideal customer of your product. It helps the marketing experts to maximize the potential of the marketing techniques. A persona also makes the customer experience suit them perfectly.

A buyer persona generally represents a set of buyers and their common characteristics. There are many ways in which a buyer persona would work. The relative importance of each depends upon the market as well.

What Is The Importance Of A Buyer Persona?

Now that we know what a buyer persona is, let’s get to know why personas are important. Buyer personas allow you to understand the need of your customers. They tell you what and how your customers buy and how you can reach them and make them choose your product. All of this makes it easier for you to create your content and tailor your services and products to match the evolving needs of your customers.

What successful buyer personas do is:

1. Attract the right kind of customers and help you in retaining them in the long run
2. Makes you focus on the exact needs of your customers
3. Help you engage with your customers before, during, and after-sales support.
4. Enable you to find and utilize more effective marketing methods and tools

A successful buyer persona builds a bond of trust with your customers. That trust leads them into buying your product and staying loyal to you. Knowing the motivations and buying habits of your customers will help you target them appropriately.

You can have another insight here: Position yourself in the market, the right way

What Are Characteristics of A Buyer Persona?

Buyer personas are critical to the success of any brand. That is because it helps a business get the maximum ROI on their marketing and sales. According to a study, more than 20% of the companies increased their sales after creating and propagating powerful buyer personas.

The common characteristics of buyer personas include:

• Behavioral characteristics include the communication channels like social media, TV channels, etc., and tools like computers, mobile phones, etc.
• Social characteristics like income, job, family and financial status, etc.
• Demographic characteristics like gender, age, location, etc.
• Psychological characteristics like personal choices, preferences, etc.

What Is The Top Reason to Use A Buyer Persona?

A bit of overconfidence by the marketing experts or businesses can lead to them overlooking the creation of buyer personas. Such a move on their part can make them stagnant in constant evaluation of customer needs. That is a big mistake as the consumers can very easily move on to buy the other products as their needs evolve with time.

I’ll mention a few reasons why every business should use buyer personas to expand their reach even further and increase their customer base.

1.     Asking the Right Questions

What buyer personas do is that they make you think the right way about your customers. When you are trying to make a successful persona, you have to know who your customers are. For that, you will have to ask the right questions. Such questions will help you create a persona that is accurate and represents your product comprehensively.

Here are a few sample questions that help a business know more about the customers and retain them for the future.

– Before Purchasing the Product

1. What products are you interested in?
2. Your areas of interest?
3. What aroused your interest in our product?
4. Did you easily find the products you were looking for?

– After the Purchase & Before Delivery

1. What were the deciding factors of your purchase decision?
2. How would you evaluate the buying experience?
3. What is your preferred method of delivery & payment?

– After-Sales Experience

1. Are you satisfied with your purchase?
2. Does the product that you have bought meet your expectations? How could it be improved?
3. Do you plan to buy new products in the future?

Such questions also help a business build its customer knowledge base. Expanding this knowledge base makes your customers think that you are a company that takes care of them and their needs.

According to a study by Forbes, the common mistake most companies make while creating a buyer persona is to focus on the wrong questions. Identifying the right questions is truly essential.

2.     Finding the Potential Clients

After you have created your buyer persona for your business or a product, you can use it to find the actual customers on different platforms. Personas will help you find the real leads that will eventually increase your sales. Buyer personas tell you who your current audience is and who your new audience will be.

You can then devise marketing strategies to match your persona with the real people and then begin targeting them as potential customers.

3.     Saving Time to Come Up With New Ideas

Suppose you have already created a specific buyer persona. It will not be difficult for you to edit it or improve anything if you’d want to update it. Brainstorming and focusing on the characteristics of your target audience every time from scratch is very much time-consuming and tedious if you do not have a buyer persona already.

All you would have to do is to change the specific things in the already-crafted persona and you’d be good to go again to target your audience.

4.     Getting Everyone on the Same Page

A successful buyer persona can be used by everyone in your company or the marketing department. This helps in creating campaigns and marketing strategies that are fully aligned with each other, hence maximizing the ROI.

Personas make getting on the same page simple easily and effectively.

What is a Successful Buyer Persona & How to Create It?

It can take up to 2 months to create a persona that will help you get more leads and boost your sales. It is not about the time but giving you the context so that you don’t stop from making the efforts. To make a successful and creative persona, you need to focus on a few things that I’ll mention here.

1.     Accurately & Correctly Identify Your Customers

Start making the buyer persona of your product by using the customer information you already have in your customer information base. The marketing experts have to analyze and scrutinize the purchase habits and data of the customers to identify the common characteristics.

A good practice here would be to make different groups of the customers you want to target, based on the common characteristics. Such characteristics or common traits could include new customers, repeatedly-buying customers, impulse buyers, etc.

Then, identify the exact group that matches your exact specifications of the target audience. This way, you will know who will be your customers in the market.

Make sure to make room to include any additional types of customers or statistics in your persona model. That would help you to adapt to any evolving changes in the customer market.

2.     Collect Information from Your Target Audience

The first step was to identify your potential customers. The second step is to collect their information. With the help of that information, you will be able to create more detailed personas. The following points, related to the target customers, are the key to defining the buyer persona.

1. The gender your persona will be targeting.
2. Interests would this persona target.
3. The education level of the desired persona.
4. Locations would this persona target.
5. The reasons for buying your product.
6. Concerns while buying the product.

Every brand or product may have a specific set of own questions. The above-mentioned list constitutes the commonly focused points. You should know that the needs are always evolving so your buyer persona would also be changing with time. Every persona is unique because it relates to a specific set of questions it answers.

Get the details of their motivations to buy and their goals. Know the answer to the “why” of the customers. Why you? Why your product?

Remember what Theodore Levitt said:

“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”

3.     Create Buyer Personas Based On the Gathered Information

You will now have a detailed knowledge database of the customers that you want to target. Sort them out into different groups based on the answers that you get. Knowing what exactly a buyer persona is would help you make a different draft for each group separately.

Each group will be based upon a unique set of characteristics like age, gender, location, etc. If you want any further information still, you may have to conduct surveys or ask questions in interviews or questionnaires through email, website, or during in-store visits. Start give-away campaigns or promos as a gift for completing the questionnaires or surveys to encourage people to answer them correctly.

This can even be done more easily on social media platforms where you can interact with your potential customers efficiently. Social media allows you to target the audience in a very specific way. That’s something that you would not be able to efficiently achieve in normal surveys. You can even get much more accurate data at a much less price through online surveys than you’d get in offline surveys.

For example, Instagram has incorporated a new feature that allows the companies to ask the users personalized questions on Instagram Stories. Using such platforms will allow you to get answers to very specific questions for your buyer persona.

Once you have all the necessary information, start developing a comprehensive persona to target your specific customer base. Identify the main characteristics of your customer and create a detailed picture of the profile of your target audience in your persona.

4.     Make Room for Continuous Evolution

Just remember the fact that the market trends are ever-changing. The needs of your target audience may also evolve. Your work won’t stop after you have created the buyer persona of your brand. The response to your product or brand will continue to change because of the changing trends. Your competitors are also evolving so you have to get better than them all.

For this, you need to understand your customers and have access to thorough customer insights. Keep changing your created persona based on the trends, feedback, and audience response.

Conclusion

To create better personas, you need to map the “buyer journey” of your customers. Understand why they need the product, what they go through while buying that product and how that product resolves their problem.

An intelligently created persona would result in a massive ROI. So pay attention to it.

The number of buyer personas you should have depends on the number of distinct audiences you want to target. Just knowing what your buyer persona is, is important. It is what will get your product to be known in the market.

Create it, use it, update it and have fun with it.