Buyer Personas and How to Use Them - Part 1: Buyer Persona Overview
A buyer persona gives you insight into your customers that you can use to formulate your strategy and make decisions. To put it simply, a buyer persona is basically a description of a particular segment of people you want to target for your business or marketing and promotion plans. It is a model of your prospective buyer.
Creating a buyer persona assists you in understanding the requirements of your customer. It allows you to think from the point of view of someone who might buy your product. You can have a single persona or have many of them, but the aim is to understand the buyer’s needs. Once you are able to figure that out, it’s a lot simpler for you to communicate with prospective buyers and convince them to purchase your products.
Clearly defining a buyer persona can be key to clearly defining your marketing strategy because, when done well, buyer personas are the closest model your company can have to actual customers and prospects. That means real-world insights on why customers do or don’t buy from you, how they find out about your products and your competitors, what their pain points are and how to address them, and more.
One of the most important things to keep in mind as you embark upon buyer persona creation is to ensure that personas reflect the actual needs of customers and prospects, not inadvertently glorify the features your product offers. This is a trap many companies fall into, unintentionally creating self-serving personas. Keep your personas honest and you’ll gain much more insight from them.
Doing in-depth research about customers will help in unifying the management, sales and marketing parts of your plan. All these three parts of your plan cater to different things. The management portion deals with the products the customer wants. Marketing deals with grabbing the attention of the buyer. And sales assesses why the buyer needs the product.
Creating buyer personas that each of these critical parts of your organization agrees upon and gains insight from can greatly help amplify their efforts as a team and unify their efforts, which makes the exercise well worth it.
In Part 2, we’ll cover the process for gathering information to create buyer personas, how to synthesize it, and how to disseminate it across your organization.
Karen Goldfarb is a welcome guest blogger on the site. I am sure you will find her articles both interesting and insightful.Karen is an award-winning freelance copywriter and marketing strategist who got her start in direct marketing. The desire to really understand the audience, ensure the copy is compelling and the right offer is made at the right time is in her blood. This same strategic, action-oriented thinking informs her work across all projects, whether it’s on websites, collateral, online advertising, videos, or brands. Her clients have included Apple, TreSEMME/Alberto, Revlon, Lipton, Gevalia, Country Time Lemonade, AOL, Microsoft, SAP, and The California Academy of Sciences.
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