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When it comes to internet marketing, particularly inbound marketing, knowing your consumers is critical to success. Research shows that as early as 2016, consumers would go 57 percent of the purchase journey before engaging a sales representative. That is to say, they do a lot of research on their own and even do the comparison and early phases of decision making before involving the sales representative.
If you don’t understand where your customer is on the buying curve when you first meet them, you could make costly mistakes in how you approach them, possibly compromising your chance to close the deal. This is where buyer personas come in handy.
Essentially, a buyer persona is a detailed description of your ideal customer. It’s unfortunate that most people still think that a buyer persona is a demographic mapping of an ideal customer. Buyer personas are much more than that. HubSpot discusses 20 elements that must be covered in creating effective buyer persons. And while personal demographics appear at the top of the list, the other 19 components are said to be just as important. They include the buyer’s;
- Educational background
- Career path
- Industry
- Job role
- Who they report to
- Goals, and
- Shopping preferences
Benefits of a buyer persona
But what makes buyer personas so important? Well, as some experts put it, these brief descriptions allow you to market your brand and products/services right. Here are six ways buyer personas can benefit your inbound marketing efforts;
- They inform marketing and sales strategies
Marketing is all about trying to understand buyer behaviors. You want to know why people buy certain products while overlooking others and why they behave in certain ways when exposed to certain environments. For example, why would a person choose to buy an iPhone 6 even when they can get an HTC One M8 at a lower price? And, why would they buy from EBay rather than from a local dealer? For small businesses, you might be asking, why would James overlook my store and buy from my direct competitor when we actually sell the same products?
A buyer persona can partially answer these questions by revealing things that the buyer likes that your competitor has or offers but you don’t have/offer.
- Develop a common language for sales
A common problem in sales that exists in both small businesses and bigger brands is what is called silo barriers. Silos in business setups essentially refer to how the organizations are structured. For example, a mid-sized company might have a sales department, a marketing department, a technology department, a finance department and so on. Having these silos is important because it breeds expertise in different areas. The problem usually arises when these departments need to communicate about a particular customer. In some cases, the barriers in communication can be so enormous that two departments may refer to the same customer using different terms, causing a lot of confusion.
This lack of coordinated communication can be partly solved by having buyer personas that every department refers to, ensuring that everyone is on the same page.
- Inform market and customer strategies
Every company has go-to-market strategies. You first develop a product or set up a store, then think about a unique selling position, and thereafter assemble a sales and marketing team to get your product to the market. That is how it should be. Unfortunately, that’s not how it always is.
Many times, decision-making relative to go-to-market strategies, sales, and marketing can amount to a guessing game. Since buyer behaviors are always changing, your go-to-market strategies might already be obsolete. For example, recently, Facebook was the top social media network for advertising . Today, Instagram is leading the way! Two years ago, PC was the preferred channel when making purchases; today, mobile is king. If you don’t have a way of keeping tabs on these developments, you may easily lose track of where to find your consumers.
A buyer persona can also become invaluable here. By regularly updating your buyer personas, you will always know where your customers are and the best way to reach them.
- Buyer personas have been proved to result in better business performance
The right buyer personas will get you more business, leading to better profits. There are two reasons for this. First, the right buyer personas allow organizations to better categorize their customers. By looking at what pages each customer has visited, emails that they open and what they click, it becomes easier to assign leads to a given buyer persona. Categorizing your customers the right way is usually the first step in preparing to provide what they want, sometimes before they realize it.
Secondly, the right buyer personas allow for personalized customer service. One of the biggest challenges in the digital economy is delighting consumers. With so much information at their fingertips, consumers have become quite choosy. Why… because they can! If you want to attract and keep hold of these customers, you need to find ways of talking to them at a personal level. The right buyer personas can help you here.
- Buyer personas are necessary for the globalized economy
Finally, as we embrace a globalized economy, the role of buyer personas cannot be overstressed. Today, someone from the UK can buy from an online store belonging to a Hong Kong businessman - easily and without hindrances. These are usually people you have never seen and some who you may never get to meet in real life.
The main challenge with such a globalized market is that companies are entering new markets with little or completely no knowledge of buyer behaviors in those markets. To succeed, you need to quickly find ways to map out how users in those markets behave.
The other challenge is that the information age leaves absolutely no room for errors. Consumers will stop at your website for a second, see that your content is irrelevant, and click away the next second. This shows just how important it is to create the right content. To do so, you need to know what your customers love to read; you need buyer personas.
Summary
As you can see, buyer personas aren’t just another business tool, they are very important especially in understanding and meeting customer needs. Our book below discusses the most important things which you should know about buyer personas.
The key take away is that when creating buyer personas, you need to pay particular attention to the buyer’s; primary initiatives, success factors, perceived barriers, the buying journey, and decision criteria. We have also provided blank templates for developing three personas.