Identifying buyer personas is essential for attracting website visitors, generating leads, and increasing your customer base. But how do you go about identifying buyer personas for your business? Keep reading to explore how you can define your target audience’s buyer personas.
What Is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a business development tactic that helps you know your customers better. Buyer personas are primarily based on thorough research of your existing target customers. They allow you to draft content and develop products and services that benefit your desired audience, giving you a chance to understand your target customers’ needs, concerns, and behaviors.
Data reveals that around 90% of companies were able to create a clear understanding of their customers with buyer personas. For instance, let’s suggest that your target audience is into fashion. That information alone won’t help you develop a strategic business strategy. If you aren’t aware of their unique needs, interests, and varying backgrounds, you won’t know their pain points.
Knowing your ideal customer helps you align your brand voice and product development accordingly. An ideal buyer persona typically depends on the insights you collect from your customer base and market research. You can have as few as 1 or 2 buyer personas and as many as 10-15. Nonetheless, if you’re just starting, it’s better to go slow – you can always make new ones when required.
How to Define Your Buyer Persona - the Right Way
Many marketers consider personalization when communicating with potential and long-term customers. However, the truth is that relevance is far better for email marketing than personalization.
When sending relevant information, you appeal to their pain points, making the conversation much more effective. Sending a customized greeting will be effective only to a certain point. In reality, they are just conversation starters and not enough to engage your customers for a problem you want to resolve.
To make the process more authentic, consider the buyer persona as a matchmaking profile for your target customers. You can do so by crafting detailed personas to represent groups with shared characteristics.
How To Create a Buyer Persona
If you aren’t sure how to define your buyer persona, consider the following:
Gather Information
You need to research to collect all the necessary information. For that purpose, you can consider your sales team feedback on leads they’re communicating with, search your contact database, and interview prospects.
Get to know what products they like the best and what they have to say about the products you believe you serve the best.
Once you’ve gathered all the information, you need a persona template to organize it. Later, you can share it with your team so they can gain an understanding of the persona they need to target.
Fill In Basic Demographic Information
Basic demographic information is about buyer persona segmentation like age, gender, marital status, occupation, nationality, and more.
You can ask such questions in person, online, or over a phone call – different people are comfortable with varying approaches.
If you also get to pick up on their mannerisms during a conversation, it will be the icing on the cake. You can convey them to your company’s team to identify specific personas when communicating with their prospects.
Enter What You Figured Out About Your Persona's Goals
Here’s where you’ll enter all the information you figured out by asking “why” during the interviews:
- What does your persona like the most?
- How do they define their goals?
- Where do they want to see themselves in the next five years?
Essentially, put together this information and tell people how you can help them out.
Get Your Sales Team Ready for Conversations With Your Personas
Make sure you include some things quoted by your people in the interview. This will highlight the concerns of your personas and what they want.
Follow this by preparing a few objections they may raise. This strategy will help your team be ready beforehand. They’ll be able to address those questions when interacting with prospects.
Ensure Your Company Mirrors a Prospect’s Tone
Your team members must know how to talk about your products and services. From basic details to complex features of a product, everything must be highlighted.
Tell your team how they can present solutions that align with your personas. Having the same persona as a company is crucial to set the basis for effective communication with customers and prospects.
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Tips for Creating an Ideal Buyer Persona
Ask Questions and Keep the Communication Relevant
After figuring out who exactly you’ll talk to, you need to have a real, relevant conversation. It can include job-related questions, goal questions, challenge questions, or personal questions.
A few examples include:
- What is your job title?
- How do you define success in your current role?
- What are your biggest challenges?
- Ask about their demographics
This is your chance to collect all the essential data; make sure you gather specific information.
Identify Customer Goals
Your customer goals can be professional or personal, depending on your product and service offering. Identifying customer goals allows you to figure out what motivates your target audience.
Aside from knowing their pain points, get to know about the issues they are trying to resolve. Are they facing any hurdles to fulfill their goals? What is keeping them from reaching their full potential?
Conduct Research
When conducting research, you can review industry-specific journals and publications.Diving into industry conferences is another golden opportunity to unveil valuable information about your target audience. Conferences attempt to entice attendees through several topics in breakout sessions. If you get a chance to access any of the sessions, you’ll discover a lot about your prospects, their needs, goals, and more.
Check Your Work for Relevancy
As stated earlier, making a buyer persona may be straightforward, but creating a successful one does not come easy.
When creating a buyer persona, you need to check if you’ve drafted work relevant to the target market. You can do so by composing a few cold calls and emails. If you start to gain authentic information, you’re on the right track.
This eliminates the chance of inauthentic personalization that won’t help much. Communication resonating with your target audience will undoubtedly boost conversions.
Consider the "Why" Questions
Since your goal is to understand your potential customer behaviors, motives, and goals, you can follow up with “why” questions after asking just about anything.
It’s important to note that buyers aren’t always good at reflecting their behaviors to tell you what exactly drives them. Consider the beginning the conversation by asking simple questions and gradually take a deeper dive.
You’ll end up discovering more with “why” questions instead of certain shallow questions.
Key Takeaways
When creating buyer personas, it’s important to be strategic and prioritize relevancy over personalization. At Sapper Consulting, we help businesses develop buyer persona-focused email marketing materials that convert leads into customers. When you’re ready to boost sales, contact our email marketing experts!
