By Rob Petersen, {grow} Community Member
Buyer Personas rock and I’m about to show you why.
Buyer Personas are written characterizations of the real buyers who influence or make decisions about the products, services or solutions you market. They are a tool that builds confidence in strategies to persuade buyers to choose you rather than a competitor or the status quo.
Buyer Personas are extremely useful for developing and evaluating messaging, content and offers that differentiate your brand from competitors. They are a foundation for any business that relies on customer acquisition, conversion and retention which, of course, is every business.
The best personas are created from real surveys and interviews – not from ballpark guesses, conjecture or assumptions.
To convince you it’s worthwhile, here are 31 business building benefits of Buyer Personas.
TARGETING AND POSITIONING
- Gives you a target for all prospects and customers
- Can’t effectively market a product or service if you don’t know who you are trying to communicate with
- Positions your products as relevant and worthy of consideration
- Provides valuable insights for prospecting, performing market research, targeting advertising, website design, usability testing and keywords for SEO
- Gives a deeper understanding and models buying behaviors of buyers and customers
- Creates higher quality lead generation
- Avoids wasting time on those less of a fit
MESSAGING AND MEDIA
- Gives you the information and perspective you need to make objective decisions about how to craft your marketing messages
- Focuses marketing and advertising efforts
- Creates compelling content and offers
- Helps determine the platforms and media you use
- Enables content to be created to meet the targeted needs of each profile and speaks directly to the needs of each persona.
- Gives a framework to have informed discussions about who your customers are, how they behave, and what they want
- Helps make better connections through a common, focused understanding of an ideal customer’s common attributes, motivations, challenges and concerns
- Helps to speak to buyers and customers in their language
- Helps to be smarter at interpreting the digital behavior of our buyers and customers
PURCHASE MOTIVATIONS IN THE BUYING PROCESS
- Gets a grasp of your prospect’s buying behavior
- Enables you to details each step in the buying process
- Are the blueprint for resources required to make a purchase decision
- Gives insight into how to foster interaction
- Relates to understanding how buying takes place and what is their critical buying path-to-purchase
- Allows you to truly tailor your marketing messages so you can get the best possible response at every touch point in the buying cycle
- Puts everyone in the company on the same page with respect to messaging and communications
- Won’t get the best return on your investment unless you conduct the fundamental research that tells you which customers are most likely to make a purchase and what you can say or do to increase the likelihood of a sale
- Allows you to develop the most cost-effective marketing strategy based on how potential customers are most likely to act
- Develops a deep awareness of their day-to-day routine, challenges, goals and other insights into the type of person they are
COMPANY ALIGNMENT
- Helps the marketing team better assess their segmentation, messaging and program strategies
- Aligns your sales process and communicate with prospects on a more meaningful level
- Improves the quality and quantity of conversations with your customers
- Are critical for the creation of any marketing content and campaigns that deliver conversations, especially for use with marketing automation tools and their industry-specific buying tracks
HUMAN FACE FOR SALES AND MARKETING
- Gives a human face to a collection of abstract data
In my experience, 3 to 4 Buyer Personas usually account for 90%+ of a company’s sales.
For a great discussion on buyer personas, please check out this podcast episode with Mark Schaefer: Buyer Personas
Do you know the Buyer Personas for your brand? Do you think it’s worth knowing them? I’d love to hear how you are using this tool.
Rob Petersen is an experienced advertising and marketing executive and the founder of the BarnRaisers agency. Follow Rob on Twitter: @RobPetersen
Illustration courtesy of Flickr CC and gnuckx