His name is Luke. He has a small software development business, which he runs for almost 3 years. He is interested in business growth strategies, marketing and the latest technologies. This is an example of a short buyer persona that you as a business need to know.

Buyer personas or marketing personas are fictional representations of ideal customers for a particular business. Their profile includes personal information, where they work, the challenges that they face in the position they occupy, their long term objectives and their opinion about a product or service you offer. These profiles are extremely useful not only in developing marketing campaigns and strategies, but also for releasing better versions of a product or improving its features. They establish the direction in which your business goes and the methods and tools you use in the growth process of the company.

It can be observed that buyer personas are essential for the development of a business. An important aspect related to them is how companies can create detailed and well-defined profiles. The answer stands in creating a set of questions and addressing them to the right people like current customers and prospects. Using the information you gathered from them, you create profiles which you share with and explain to your business colleagues. Every person needs to understand the importance of a buyer persona and how to use them.

The importance of a buyer persona

Buyer personas can help you understand better two types people:

• your current customers
• your potential customers

Why do you need to know better your current customers? The information related to the experience they had with your business, their opinion about your products and services can help you understand if you have any aspects that you need to improve or that you should add. It can give you valuable insights on how to create better experiences for them and how to motivate them to return to you. Thus, you can increase your sales and your customer retention.

The potential customers are people who fit in your target audience and you want to attract. For this reason, you need to adapt your messages, content, products and services in order to suit their needs. You need to have high-quality messages that will catch their attention and make them become interested in you and what you offer. This is why you need to have detailed buyer personas that will guide you when creating marketing campaigns and strategies.

How to use a buyer persona

Buyer personas are ideal for creating marketing strategies for specific categories of people. Detailed profiles offer information that allows you to create very targeted strategies. Let’s look at the following situation. You are working on an email marketing campaign to promote your latest software product. You want to show your potential customers the benefits they have if they buy it. However, when you collected the information for your buyer persona, you noticed that the needs of men are different from women’s needs. For this reason, you create two email templates in which you emphasize different benefits of your product according to the needs each buyer persona has.

Moreover, you can write very specific and targeted content based on the information given by the buyer persona. This means that you will deliver content that can be seen as useful to and relevant for your target audience. It can increase your chances of converting these people into your clients.

How to create a buyer persona

When you want to create a buyer persona, you need to include information that you will use in your future campaigns. A basic template of a persona includes the following pieces of information:

• demographics:  age, gender, education, family, location, salary
• job title: information about the company and the occupied position
• goals and challenges
• values and fears
• marketing message
• elevator pitch

The last two elements are your contribution. The marketing message represents a short description of the product for the persona. The elevator pitch is a continuation of the message. You provide more details about the product and you construct it in order to sell your product to the persona.

The process of obtaining this information is important and needs to be well organized. Here are a few ways of gathering information for your buyer persona.

1. Create form fields to catch specific information

When you create forms on your website, you can include some fields that can help you obtain specific information from your audience. If you are interested in knowing about the domain they are working in or the position they occupy within a company, include these questions in your forms. However, you should not make them mandatory. People should be able to choose which fields they want to complete.

2. Interview your customers

Your customers hold valuable insights about your business. They have engaged with you at least once and have good knowledge of your products and services. There are two types of customers you can interview: the ones that have had a positive experience with you and the ones that have had a negative one. The latter ones are important because they can provide a different perspective. They can tell you if you have some customer service gaps or what they did not like about your product. For instance, you can learn what features you need to improve and what you should add in order to suit their needs better.

When you interview you customers, you need to explain them clearly that you are looking for their feedback and the information they give you is very valuable for your business. It will make them feel that they have a great opportunity to share their opinions and to contribute to your business.

3. Interview your prospects

Prospects are people who have interacted with your business, but have not purchased any product or service from you. They can offer you a different perspective from the ‘exterior’ and help you identify who can fit in your target audience.

The number of interviews you should take varies from case to case. It depends on how many personas you want to create. One persona can be created based on  3-5 interviews. Also, as you interview more people, you should start seeing certain patterns. They will help you see if you have a sufficient number of interviews to work with.

Buyer personas play an important role for your business. They help you understand better the needs and interests of your target audience. In this way, you know on what aspects to focus on and how to develop better marketing strategies and campaigns to attract new potential clients.

What methods do you use to construct a buyer persona?

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