In this first of three blogs, we will look at what is a buyer persona and why you create them. In the second blog we’ll look at the differences between B2B and B2C buyers’ personas and in the third blog we’ll look at how to create a B2B or a B2C buyer persona template.
What is a buyer persona and why you need to create them
Do you want better qualified leads from your PR and social media marketing efforts? Then you must first build a buyer persona(s).
As a marketing consultant, the answer I get most often when asking businesses who their customers is a resounding EVERYBODY? Can this really be the case? The logical answer is NO.
Before any business can ever hope to market successfully it MUST define its buyer. So whether it’s social media marketing, PR, email marketing etc. you need identify you best or ideal customer before you can even begin to think of how you’re going to market to them.
Buyer persona is the term that is often mentioned when it comes to identifying these niches. Once you have a clear idea who is your ‘buyer’ you can then decide on the strategies for reaching and selling to this ‘buyer’.
This process is crucial as it will save time and money since your efforts will be focused on marketing to this niche only. The old adage of ‘marketing to few’ is better than ‘marketing today’ is true today as it was then.
Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner
Let’s look at a real life example to better illustrate the vital importance of creating a buyers persona. Imagine you’ve invited a new friend over for dinner. Which of the following scenarios is more practical?
Making a meal and then asking the person if they have any food allergies when they arrive or asking them about possible food allergies before making the meal? Unless you’re prepared to throw away a good meal and start another the answer should be pretty obvious.
The same is true of a business. If you start your marketing before getting to know more about your customers, you’re probably going to have to go back and make costly, time-consuming changes that could have been avoided if you had created and referenced your buyer personas.
Beneficial Customer Relationships
Profiling customers, also known as creating buyer personas, if done well, will create beneficial customer relationships which in turn drives sales. This blog will focus on what a buyer persona really is, how to differentiate between different buyer personas and finally how to create your own to enhance your marketing strategy.
What are Buyer Personas?
A buyer persona is essentially your ideal customer. It’s the fabric of your marketing plan and will build an accurate description of all the variables required to build your ideal lead, and in turn a paying customer.
Buyer personas provide tremendous structure and insight for your business. A detailed buyer persona will help you determine where to focus your time, guide product development and allow for alignment across the organisation. As a result, your marketing plan will be focused in the right areas and will assist with attracting the most valuable visitors, leads and customers for your business.
Buyer personas (often referred to as marketing personas) are fictional generalised representations of your ideal customers. Having a deep understanding of your buyer personas is critical to driving content creation, product development, sales follow up and really anything that relates to customer acquisition and retention.
Why Create Buyer Personas?
Creating accurate buyer personas is critical to business success in any sector. Buyer personas help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) better. This makes it easier for you to tailor content, messaging, product development and services to specific needs, behaviours and concerns of different groups.
They allow you to not only identify your target audience but to connect to them as if you know them. You can make someone want or need a product or service by understanding their needs. Thus, in order to get a full understanding of your customers and what makes them tick, it’s critical to develop detailed personas.
Accurate buyer personas are critical to success. With accurate personas you can;
• Identify the customer’s needs and wants
• Understand how your customers make purchasing decisions
• Develop new or improved products and services
• Determine where your customers spend their time
• Unify employees with a clear marketing message
• Segment your marketing to effectively target key individual groups
• Easily sort leads to prioritise those most likely to end up with a sale
As you can see creating buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers is crucial to business success.
In the next blog we will look at the main differences between B2B and B2C buyer persona and the mistakes businesses often make in their creation.
Why not sign up to our low cost ‘Buyer Persona and Intro to Lead Generation Workshop’
£10* (With LIMITED OFFER promo code bp25 or £25 without)
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