Most industry insiders agree that good marketing is all about figuring out not just what to say to your audience, but also when and how to say it. In order to craft that perfect message and communicate it effectively, you need to understand your audience.
And this understanding starts with a buyer persona.
A Research on customer patterns shows that about 61% of global internet users research products online and are 57% of the way through their purchase decision before engaging a sales representative.
This is where buyer personas come into the picture for a salesperson. It fundamentally helps you understand two things:
- Who your customer is, and
- How to talk to them
When you understand their motivations, you can easily address your customer's queries, desires, and needs in your marketing materials.
The process of creating buyer personas also helps you analyze trends, behaviours, similarities, and patterns amongst your target audience, which helps you create a marketing and sales strategy built around their objectives, day-to-day challenges, and ‘pain points.
In other words, understanding the buyer’s persona is essential for a business to grow. By creating prospect-orientated marketing campaigns and content, you show your target audience you understand their purchasing pains and problems intimately, encouraging them to engage further with your business.
What is a Buyer’s Persona?
As you probably already know - lead generation requires tailoring your marketing efforts toward the right people; buyer personas are a crucial tool in this.
Buyer personas represent the type of buyer you have identified as the most likely to gain utility (or satisfaction) from your organization or product.
While an organization can have multiple buyer personas, they are not all about demographics.
It is about designing a buyer profile that gathers useful insights into their buying habits and how to attract them with the relevant sales pitch and product information. Buyer personas allow you to better understand the needs and wants of your customers, which allows doing a more efficient job of appealing to those specific desires.
Importance of Buyer’s Persona: An Example
All brands, old and new, can benefit from the development and upkeep of their brand personas. In fact, a recent survey showed some staggering results of having an identified buyer persona:
- a 900% increase in length of visit on the webpage
- a 171% increase in marketing-generated revenue
- a 111% increase in email open rate
- and a 100% increase in the number of pages visited.
Here’s an example of buyer’s persona predictability gone wrong:
Remember the infamous Gap rebrand in 2010? The ultimate goal was to appeal to a younger audience but in doing so, Gap failed to understand their current audience and faced a backlash.
Existing customers felt hurt that Gap was trying to be “fashion-forward” and trendy when the past aesthetic appeal was that they were a good, basic option for people who weren’t “into” trends.
My understanding? Gap was probably trying to repurpose its demographics, but in doing so, failed to keep all its buyer personas included in its marketing outreach.
Here’s an important takeaway:
Gap attempted to find a new audience without first understanding its existing audience and brand perception. Had they done their due diligence, they would have known that the discrepancy between their desired audience and existing audience was so large that the two could not coexist.
Gap switched back to their old logo in a record one week and wasted a large sum of money on a rebrand that did not last.
Should Small Businesses Care About Building Buyer’s Personas?
It’s pretty easy to see why buyer personas are important for businesses with multiple employees - but if you’re a solopreneur or a very small business, you might still be wondering why you should bother.
While it may be tempting to think you already know who your customers are, and spending time on creating a buyer’s persona feels like time wasted, think again. Creating and understanding your buyer’s persona can help you clearly define what you’re going after in the long run.
For example, let’s imagine you offer a product that auto-transcribes online meetings. You have a website and a blog where you share tips and tricks for effective meetings.
Obviously, you want to attract customers who are interested in making their meetings more productive, which means, your target audience is probably a work-from-home employee or a company with businesses in many countries. Building a buyer persona around this will help narrow your focus until you reach your key audience.
Perhaps you'll find that the majority of your customers are millennials, or that Gen - Z is a potential, untapped market. Presuming this is a market you'd like to continue serving, you can now adjust your website and blog content to target this specific niche.
This will make it easier to write copy for your website and to select blog topics that will resonate among your target audience.
Top 6 Tips on How to Use Buyer’s Persona For Business Growth
A buyer’s persona can have multiple uses but one of its top implementations comes in marketing. In marketing, the use of a buyer persona is multifaceted and can be regularly evaluated to ensure its accuracy and effectiveness.
And for good reason, 93% of companies who either surpassed or achieved their yearly revenue milestones, segmented their audience database by buyer persona.
A brand that takes inspiration from its buyer’s persona to navigate through the ‘content flood’ that social media has become, gives itself a unique chance to stand out.
Here are the top ways to use buyer’s persona for growing your business:
1. Identify your Influencers
Yes, no matter how ‘instagram-y’ it may seem, influencer marketing is emerging as a highly popular, and reactive aspect of modern marketing strategies. The perks of it are that you can leverage the voice of someone who already has the ear of your best buyers.
To start, identify influencers who speak directly to your buyer personas, then reach out to see if you can form a partnership in order to leverage products or share content.
Additionally, influencers could be great customer advocates. A survey trying to understand the correlation between influencers and customer advocacy found that 84% of participants were willing to do more than they already have in terms of advocacy, and an additional 27% said they would be willing to provide a testimonial for the vendor.
2. Time Your Marketing Campaigns Differently for Different kinds of Buyers
Once you create your buyer’s persona, you’ll soon realize that each of your personas operate a little differently. For example- some may check their emails first thing in the morning, while others choose to check them at the end of their day.
Once you understand the routines and habits of your target customer, you can optimize your usage of tools like Google Analytics to identify peak engagement rates, and you can judge what time your campaigns will reach the most buyers.
Ultimately, buyer personas make your marketing campaigns more effective when you know when and how to deploy them.
3. Segment Your Email Lists
e-mail marketing is the backbone of acquiring new customers and also retaining the ones you have.
Buyer personas can help you create customized email campaigns that are better at converting subscribers into customers. By segmenting your emails based on the buyers you’re targeting, you can organize your email lists by persona and send offers that are targeted to each group’s respective preferences.
And the more targeted you can make each email, the more likely it is that your audience will engage with it. In fact, emails with personalized subjects are 50% more likely to be opened.
4. Understand Purchasing Decisions for Timely Product Placement
Understanding how your personas go about purchasing things can help you gain insights into where and when to get in front of them.
For example, maybe your key buyer persona does 95% of their research online before ever approaching a company. Having that knowledge will help you get in front of them early in the process, and you can start providing them with relevant information and sell to them without directly selling to them.
5. Gain Behavioral Insight
Knowing where your key buyer personas spend the most time on the internet is crucial for the growth of your company. This helps you determine how to communicate with them, how to reach new customers, what types of content to produce, and where and how to promote it.
For example, you can't speak to a LinkedIn audience the same way you would speak to a TikTok audience. However, you may have personas in each of these. Using buyer persona to gain behavior insight not only helps you cater to different personas differently but also target your key persona in different ways.
6. Create Targeted Content
Creating buyer’s personas means understanding the needs, wants, goals, and challenges of your customers more closely.
Not only does this help you understand what your customers want to see, but it can also create a guideline for you. For example, once you know about the things that appeal to your target buyer persona, you can create relevant content that will turn into a purchase.
Remember, just because you as a business owner think that the information you're presenting is valuable does not necessarily mean your customers will. It doesn't matter how relevant you think your information is, if your customers don't find it valuable, they won't consume it.
Last 2 Cents
Whether you’re a small business, or a business scaling to newer heights - your customer will always be the guiding center of your strategies, and creating your key buyer’s persona can help you bring better efficiency in your existing efforts, just to begin with.
Whether you run a team of one or work with groups of many - creating a buyer’s persona can be a fun, re-energizing activity that helps you bring the focus of your brand back in the center.
With that in mind, go ahead and use your buyer personas in all possible creative ways. Moreover, use them to create personalized content for your audience and start generating high-quality leads!
Avantika Mishra
