Of course, every business hopes to increase its sales. However, do you actually know who you're selling to?
By creating a buyer persona for your business, you can estimate who you're selling to and create a realistic representation of your target audience, tailoring your strategies to appeal to them better.
What is a Buyer Persona?
Buyer Personas are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers. They help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) better and make it easier for you to tailor content to different groups' specific needs, behaviors, and concerns.
Creating a buyer persona offers insights into the customer you otherwise wouldn’t be privy to. Once you have your persona, share it with the marketing, sales, and customer service team to ensure your entire organization has the same view of your ideal customer.
Here are a few key things you want to know about your customer:
- What is their profession?
- What does a typical day in their life look like?
- Where do they go for information?
- How do they prefer to obtain goods and services?
- What is important to them when choosing a vendor?
- What do they value most?
- What are their goals?
Areas Where Buyer Personas Will Assist Your Business
By clearly defining your buyer persona, you can use your insights to affect how you operate in every aspect of your business.
Marketing
Also known as “marketing personas,” buyer personas often focus on your marketing team due mainly to the wide range of insights you can achieve when correctly using a persona for marketing.
How it can be effective
- Building effective content marketing strategies by focusing on keyword research efforts.
- Identify and prioritize the most relevant promotional activities.
- Segment your email list by sending targeted offers to buyers based on their preferences.
- Time your marketing campaigns for peak engagement rates.
- Publishing content and advertisements on your buyer persona's channels (email, social media) most frequented sites
- Align messaging to promote brand unity and increase brand awareness.
- Personalize your marketing automation efforts.
- Refining your copywriting to reflect improved
- SEO strategies.
Sales
Knowing your buyer is never more critical than when you are selling to them. From the start of every potential customer interaction to the end of each successful one, how you sell to a buyer depends on what you know about them from their buyer persona.
To operate from a person-driven sales strategy, use your buyer personas to:
- Craft emails, phone calls, and face-to-face interactions with potential buyers based on their persona.
- Help build rapport with potential customers.
- Understand your prospective buyer more deeply, allowing you to better address their concerns.
- Guide the messaging sales representatives use with customers.
- Educate your sales team on each different persona to prepare them to work with any type of buyer.
- Teach sales representatives to recognize each persona's unique pain points better so they can address them effectively.
- Increase win rates for your sales team.
Customer Service
Just because you’ve closed a sale doesn’t mean you have finished your relationship with your buyer. Often, what transitions a one-time buyer into a repeat customer is their interactions with your organization after purchasing. To set your customer service team up for success, involve them in the buyer persona development process so they can tailor their customer service model to each persona.
To use this persona-driven strategy to improve your customer service experience:
- Involve your customer service representatives in the buyer persona creation process to gain their invaluable insights.
- Gain a deeper understanding of the day-to-day life of each persona.
- Reflect on how marketers and sales teams use each persona to create a holistic approach to each new customer.
- Train your customers on the specific problems they are trying to solve so they are better prepared to solve them.
- Use empathy and compassion to best support your customers based on their persona.
How Do You Create a Buyer Persona?
The strongest buyer personas are based on market research and insights you gather from your actual customer base (through surveys, interviews, customer data, etc.). Depending on your business, you could have a few personas or a lot of specialized personas — you can continually develop more later if needed.
The first step is to craft your persona by asking specific questions about your ideal customer. This will help you learn as much as possible about who they are and how they interact with your organization, pinpointing how to make them customers.
We have covered additional guidance with our HubSpot Buyer Persona Templates if you want additional guidance. You can use these templates to In practice create customized slide decks outlining the motivations and challenges of your
ideal buyer personas that can be easily shared with all teams in your company.
