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A buyer persona is an in-depth description of your target customer. HubSpot describes these personas as “semi-fictional representations” of whom research suggests your ideal customers to be.
A buyer persona presents before you, a picture or profile of a typical person that might be relevant to your product in terms of purchase and usage. It is not a real person but rather a representation of your target audience. Buyer personas help you to better understand who your customers are.
The nature of the product you offer influences the type and number of buyer personas you’d need.
Why are Buyer Personas Crucial?
Buyer personas are central to your ability to get ideal customers and retain them. When you create these, you put yourself in a better position to get it right with your target audience. They help to steer everything you do toward acquiring useful leads and valuable customers.
You face an uphill task if you don’t know the right way to engage with your prospective clients. Without first properly describing your target audience, you will struggle to know how to attract and retain their interest. You are most likely to lose them in no time if you managed to get their attention at all.
Buyer personas put your ideal customers right before you. They enable you to better comprehend your target audience, including their pain points, needs, and problems. This sets you well on the way to delighting them with your product.
These representations help to drive your product development roadmap and content creation the right way. They enable you to adapt your services, messaging, and everything you do to the needs of your customers. Buyer personas make it possible to figure those things that your audience would expect you to do.
More than One Persona
The number of buyer personas that are needed isn’t the same for every business. One may suffice for some businesses while several more will be required for some others.
It is more straightforward to tell who the customer is when dealing with consumer products. However, the story is different for companies that offer enterprise or B2B products.
For consumer products, the buyer is often the user. But this is usually not the case with B2B products, which requires putting more buyer personas into consideration. When you’re dealing with more than one persona, you’d have to identify what matters more to each one.
Categories of buyer personas that may exist for a product include:
End-user – This is the person that uses the product for its intended purpose. It is usually the same person as the buyer for consumer products. Efficiency and safety are among the important considerations for them.
Executives or management – You’d need to create a buyer persona for these when dealing with enterprise products. Increased productivity, lower costs, and returns on investment are some of what matters more to them.
IT management – If you’re offering a tech product, you’d want to factor in IT teams. Pay attention to what would matter more to them, including ease of management and security. How does your product compare to rivals in these regards?
In addition to the foregoing, departmental heads, HR reps, and marketers are some of the other buyer personas that may be needed for some products.
What you offer and the individuals in your target audience will ultimately determine the number of personas you’d need to create.
Multiple Personas for Consumer Products
While the attention often is on enterprise products when talking about multiple personas for a product, they can also apply to B2C products. The buyer isn’t always the user with these products and vice versa.
To make this clearer, imagine a parent buying a mobile phone for their child. This is clearly a case where the buyer isn’t the user. Certain considerations will influence what device a parent buys, even though those might not be in sync with what matters to the child.
You will need to determine who influences the buying decision more. Does the ultimate user sway this decision or do they only demand a solution? This doesn’t mean that the perspective of the less-influential party doesn’t matter, however.
How to Create Buyer Personas
The finest buyer personas are grounded in effective research and information gathering. This is what enables you to know more about your potential customers.
There are three key steps to follow when looking to create these customer representations:
Draw up a list of questions – It is ideal to start by brainstorming questions to ask representatives of your target audience. This will include role and goal questions as well as those relating to their background. Who are they? What do they do? What are their pain points? HubSpot provides a list of some questions to ask in categories.
Gather information – With your questions ready, you can carry out interviews or surveys with prospects or customers to learn more about them and their problems. Connect with customer-facing teams to get their feedback as well. You may also use online forms to get key personal information from customers.
Analyze – The final step before creating your buyer personas is to analyze your research data. Organize the information you have and identify patterns. Then describe what you know about your target audience in detail.
Buyer Personas and Marketing
Research-based representations of your customers go a long way in aligning the work of teams across your organization. It is probably most helpful to the marketing team. Buyer personas are a very critical part of the marketing strategy.
By understanding well what your audience is, you can aim to revolve your efforts around their needs and challenges. It helps marketers to create content and campaigns that reflect to customers that they influence everything you do. It’s good to know as a customer that you, and your happiness, matter.
Buyer personas matter in every segment of the inbound process. They enable you to accentuate what is more valuable to a potential customer and at the perfect time. With them, you can be more targeted in how you interact with your audience.
