Proper marketing is essential for your business. It promotes brand awareness and also helps by reaching a broad customer base. Effective marketing can have a positive impact on the sales of your business. Adopting the right marketing strategies will give you an advantage over your competitors. Use buyer personas to get to know your target audience better and how to reach out to them effectively.

What is a “buyer persona?” It is a common term in the marketing world used to refer to a representation of your target audience. Buyer Personas are a picture you create based on your interaction with real customers. A buyer persona will help you understand where or to whom you should target your marketing campaigns and how they can affect buying decisions. Different business models can benefit from a buyer persona. Look for proper techniques that will help you build a persona that can benefit your business. Buyer personas can sometimes be challenging to identify, so we created The Rulebook to help you define the right buyer persona for your brand based on a questionnaire that you fill out. Learn more about The Rulebook here.

Benefits of a Buyer Persona

Building a buyer persona can benefit your business in so many ways. They include:

Understand Your Customers Better

You will have an easier time understanding your customers when you build a buyer persona for each type of customer. You will learn things about each buyer persona, including their habits, pain points, demographic information, and preferred ways of shopping. This information will help you with your marketing or branding campaigns.

Efficient Marketing Campaigns

A buyer persona also helps you to conduct efficient marketing campaigns. It allows you to focus on the right people consistently. Eliminating targets that aren’t part of your buyer personas will save you money and time. You don’t want to target people who will have zero or no impact on your marketing campaigns.

Avoid Criticism

Building a buyer persona can help you avoid criticism and different types of objections from your customers. Buyer personas provide information that enables you to understand the specific problems your potential buyer is facing—ultimately allowing you to get ahead and look for strategies that can solve their problems.

Targeted Marketing

Grouping your customers according to their preferences or persona can help you carry out targeted marketing easily. You can send content tailored for a specific target audience. Targeted marketing is essential to seeing quality results in your marketing campaigns and also building a good relationship with your clients.

Great Sales Experience

A buyer persona can also guarantee you the best sales experience. Your sales team will be able to identify the right people to target. And, they can use the information on each buyer persona to use the right language. You are guaranteeing quality results by defining your buyer personas.

Building a Buyer Persona

Creating a buyer persona can help your brand generate more money through marketing campaigns. Here is how you can develop a buyer persona.

Know Your Customers Better

How do you get to know your buyer personas? You have to be willing to get to know your customers and their preferences. Use questionnaires, face-to-face interviews, and analytics tools to find answers to personal and career-related questions on your customers. From your findings, you will be able to utilize better strategies that fit with your buyer personas. Here are a few questions to ask your customers or find information on:

Personal questions you can ask a specific buyer include:

• What is your age?
• What is your gender?
• What is your marital status?
• Do you have children?
• Do you own a home or rent?
• How do you spend your day?
• What do you prefer to do for fun?
• Who do you live with?

Career questions you can ask a specific buyer include:

• What are your career goals?
• Which company do you work for?
• How do you like to communicate?
• What challenges do you face at work?
• Are you familiar with the internet?
• Which social networking platforms do you prefer to use?

You will most likely get a variety of answers. That’s ok! Some businesses have one buyer persona, while other businesses have multiple. But, these questions will help build out the buyer personas for your business.

Grouping Your Customers

Once you’ve collected answers from different customers or prospects, it’s time you subdivide them into different groups. Segmenting should be done according to the responses you received from your questions or analytics. Group your buyer personas according to the different characteristics they share to have an easier time sending personalized branding or marketing content. 

You can segment your buyers according to their geographical location, demographics such as age, gender and religion, and psychographics such as behavior, mentality, and their ethics. You will be able to build a buyer persona that will play a pivotal role in increased sales in your company and the growth of your brand.

Creating a Buyer Persona Guide

Now that you’ve used the responses to group customers together, you need to create a buyer persona template. Put into consideration the different types of buyer personas you have created. They should have their own section in your model. This will help you understand the persons to target for your marketing campaigns.

Utilizing Buyer Personas

After building your buyer persona(s), utilize your findings to benefit your business. Require your sales team to review each buyer persona to understand the specific target audience they’re trying to reach. This will help them approach the right personas with the right questions. A buyer persona can also be useful when you are offering customer support. Your customer support team can use it to understand the communication preferences a specific customer needs.

Your customer support team can also take advantage of buyer personas to push your products. Understanding your customers better through each specific buyer persona can help them promote products, a particular customer prefers and highlight them on other issues concerning your brand. You will be able to send useful, personalized messages or content to the right personas, which will be impactful for your marketing campaigns.

Examine your personas once every year to make sure you’re targeting the right people.