Revenue generation is the number one priority of any for-profit business. Otherwise, it’s just a hobby.
But before you can consistently sell any product or service, you need to intimately understand who your ideal customers are and how you can serve them better than anyone else in your space. This means knowing everything you can about them, from their sociodemographic characteristics to their hopes, dreams, frustrations and challenges, how they make decisions, the type of information they need to make decisions, and so on.
Understanding your ideal customers to this degree of precision will make it much easier to:
- know where to find and target customers and prospects on the various social channels;
- provide them with the exact information they’re looking for when they need it; and
- convince them to buy from you once they’re ready to make their purchase decision.
Developing a buyer persona is an excellent strategy for achieving this level of customer-intel.
Buyer Persona Defined
A buyer persona is generally defined as a fictitious “person” who represents the key characteristics and traits of your ideal customer base. I’ve placed “person” in quotes because, in reality, a persona does not represent a single individual, but rather a group of individuals who are similar enough to be grouped together for targeting purposes.
Depending on the type and number of products/services offered, you may have very distinct customer groups that require their own individual personas. However, best practice is to limit the number of personas you develop, as the idea is to drill down to the commonalities within a group so all individuals within that group can be targeted collectively. As each persona will require its own marketing and sales approach, the fewer personas you have, the more streamlined and efficient your marketing and selling efforts can be.
Another best practice is to name each of your personas to make them easier to remember and relate to. The better the name represents their key characteristics, the more clarity you and your team will have around the persona. For example, Purchasing Pete and Karen the Controller are much more memorable and relatable than simply Peter and Karen.
Typical information within a buyer persona includes:
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- Professional background – job title, education, career aspirations
- Demographics – age, income, location, gender
- Social platforms – where and how they spend time online
- Challenges – what problems are they facing
- Goals – what are they hoping to achieve
- Opportunities – what you can do to help them overcome challenges and achieve goals
Where appropriate, additional information could include skillsets, personality traits and motivations.
Note that because your business is unique, your buyer personas will also be unique. However, there are templates available online (here’s HubSpot’s version) to help you build out your buyer persona(s).
Why You Need A Buyer Persona
Developing an accurate buyer persona requires in-depth thoughtful research. Consequently, it can consume a significant amount of time and resources. So, you might be wondering why someone would bother.
Here are reasons why you would want to do the necessary work of developing a buyer persona.
- A buyer persona will help you and your team develop a deeper understanding of your ideal customer’s mindset, challenges and requirements, so that all areas of your business can be aligned on how to deliver the best possible customer experience.
- You’ll be able to adjust your product or service offering to better support customer needs, thus making your business more attractive than your competitors.
- You and your marketing team will better understand where to find your ideal customers and when and how to reach out to them with the right content and messaging strategies, giving them all the info they need to choose your product or service once they’re ready to buy.
- You and your sales team will be able to more specifically and effectively address customer concerns and pain points, which will increase your close rates.
- Your operations and customer service teams will be able to deliver the best possible customer experience that leads to repeat business.
- You will avoid targeting businesses and individuals who would not be a good fit, thereby reducing the number of negative experiences for you, your team and your customers.
- All of the above will help your business grow more quickly and efficiently.
In addition, buyer personas can form an important part of the onboarding process for new employees and/or any outside consultants or freelancers you might hire on a temporary basis when your existing resources are tight.
As your business grows and you are no longer able to be as closely involved with the regular day-to-day activities, you’ll want to develop written policies and procedures that allow your team to operate more independently. Buyer personas will provide good insight into how you should structure many of your service delivery policies to ensure a best-in-class customer experience.
How To Develop A Buyer Persona
Ideally, buyer personas are developed based on customer research as opposed to opinions or assumptions, but if you don’t have hard data then opinions and assumptions can be used as a starting point. However, your opinions and assumptions should always be tested and verified before being accepted as fact.
Ways to do this include interviewing your best customers, conducting surveys and investing in market research. Tools like Hotjar can be used to analyze your web pages to find out where customers are spending the most time on your site, providing insight into the type of information your customers and potential customers are searching for. You can also analyze your social posts (and those of your competitors) to see which topics and issues drive the greatest engagement.
Take the opportunity to ask your customers what their biggest struggles are, what type of information would help them make the best decisions, where they currently get their information and what you can do to better support their needs.
Don’t forget to check with your sales and customer service teams to learn what questions are being asked by customers most often and which concerns are being raised on a regular basis. Your marketing team should be able to provide similar insights based on customer engagement on your social media platforms.
As noted in the previous section, your buyer persona will be unique to your business and thus you will need to create one based on your own business experience. However, multiple templates are available online to help you with the basic thought process and formatting. Here again is the link to download some free buyer persona templates from HubSpot.
As a reminder, keep your number of personas to a minimum. Each persona should be a distinct grouping of customers that are similar enough for you to create a single messaging strategy that resonates with the entire group. According to the experts, you should end up with no more than three to five personas, unless your business offers multiple products and services to multiple markets.
Once you’ve completed the initial draft of your personas, take a second, more critical look at whether some of them can be combined. The fewer personas you have, the more time and attention you can allocate to developing and implementing a solid messaging strategy for each.
Consider also developing a “negative” buyer persona that clearly identifies who you do not want to do business with. This can be a valuable tool for helping your sales and marketing teams understand the types of people you do not want them wasting time and resources on.
All this will take some practice to get right, so don’t stress out about it not being perfect from day one. Test, learn and adjust as you go. Over time, you will develop a deeper understanding of your customer groups as you hone your messaging to be more targeted and effective.
Final Thoughts
A buyer persona is a great tool for keeping you and your team focused on delivering the right message to customers and potential customers, in the right format and at the right place and time.
The time it takes to develop your buyer persona(s) will pay off in greater efficiency gains as you and your team are fully aligned with who your ideal customers are and how best to serve them.
Don’t forget that a buyer persona should be a living document that’s revisited and updated regularly as you gather more detailed information about your ideal customers.
If you have any questions about how to develop a buyer persona, feel free to DM me at @dyble.lisa