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In this blog, we give you a no-BS, straight up, clear shot of this phenomenal marketing tool called the Buyer Persona. By the time you’re done with this read, you will be ready to roll the red carpets for your perfect, tailor-made buyer personas that can literally shine a Master Shifu kinda of wisdom on your sales and marketing strategies.
IN THIS BLOG
1. WHAT is a buyer persona?
2. WHY should I bother with one?
3. HOW do I create them?
4. HOW do I use them?
WHAT is a buyer persona?
Alan Cooper, the father of “Visual Basic” introduced the term Buyer Persona in his famous 1999 book “The inmates are running the asylum”. He introduced them as a practical, interaction design tool. Today, they have evolved into a strategic component of sales & marketing planning across industries.
Buyer persona is a detailed, written down, semi-fictional description of your target consumer group/s. It lists everything – from demographics to interests and hobbies; family size and income to their professional journey.
It’s not like a CV though. Peppered simply with facts and figures or even characteristics. It’s more personal – deeper – if you please. Like YOUR account of a dear friend – her motivators and fears, her deepest desires and nightmares.
WHY should I bother with one?
Creating a buyer persona is time-consuming and can get overwhelming. You’re working with a whole lot of information and you may not intuitively know how to synthesize it. But… it’ll be worth it. In more ways than one.
First up – buyer personas help eliminate or at least reduce your days of sifting through marketing strategies like a headless chicken – hoping something from your elaborate, ingenious list will work. Instead, buyer personas help you zoom in on your consumers and know them better. In effect, you tailor-make marketing strategies that resonate with them. You reduce costs of blanket marketing initiatives, improve marketing ROI, and enhance brand recall.
“Clarity affords focus” – Thomas Leonard
16% improvement in Click Through Rates of Email marketing driven by personas | 71% number of companies that exceed revenue and lead goals AND have documented personas |
HOW to create them?
Buyer personas that are based on real people are not designed in a closed, sound-proof conference room. As Tony Zambito – founder and leading authority in buyer insights and personas – reminds, buyer personas are NOT to be created; they are to be researched and crafted in the real world.
Let’s look the case of High Five – an online training organization to navigate through this simple, intuitive, and agile process of creating buyer personas.
Their marketing strategy, communication channels will naturally have to be very different from those they’ve deployed in the past. What should they be? Well, an effective, true-to-its-salt buyer persona should take the guesswork away and answer that for High Five. Grab your cuppa and join me in designing one.
Stage 1 – Collect information
Let’s start with the target group of parents. As always – know your outcome. At the end of this entire exercise, you want to walk out with a clear understanding of who they are and why will they purchase your offering. To do so, set out to do some real research. Follow 3 best practices to make this quick and dirty. And useful.
1. Reach out to consumers of diverse settings – as diverse as is practically possible for you. For High Five, we reached out parents across geographies, income groups, single child, single parent, race, and nationalities etc.
2. Leverage face to face, telephonic, group, one-on-one or online survey formats.
3. Don’t restrict yourself to information that buyers give about themselves. You shouldn’t. It’s likely riddled with blind spots. Reach out to other sources who may know about your buyers. Like your customer-facing teams – sales, complaint box reps, tech support etc.
Prepare a basic questionnaire to lend speed and accuracy and to ensure you have all areas of importance of covered. You obviously don’t want to get paralyzed with too much analysis nor do you want to presume what your target group wants.
Keep a small incentive that encourages your consumer group to revert / participate – a discount or a sample.
Stage 2 – Analyse
All that psychographic information you’ve collected gives you valuable peek into the personality, aspirations and fears of your ideal buyer. But you must tease that out of that heap of data. At its simplest, it means you:
1. Clean up your data. Ensure you have all your responses – from all channels and groups – collated.
2. Identify prominent patterns, commonalities, and trends in this data. For instance, in the case of High Five, over 80% parents expressed their wish to see their children become A-players. Their decision to buy anything for their child was driven by how directly they believed it will impact this goal. This pattern screamed loud and clear at us leading to the birth Alpha Daddy – our first buyer persona in the target group of parents.
2. Create your buyer persona template for reasons of standardization and ease of use. There are several tools and templates out there – for example the customer avatar worksheet by Digital Marketer or HubSpot’s Buyer Persona templates. You may also click on the image above to download an editable template that will ensure you have all essentials.
4. There’s every possibility you may notice other prominent patterns. Another behaviour, motivator, or a demographic element that screams out at you. That simply means its time for a second or a third buyer persona within your target group. For the parent target group at High Five, we created our second persona called Muscle Mom – inspired by the significantly high number of mothers concerned about lack of right education on physical and mental health. All our marketing paraphernalia designed for this persona then conveyed to them that we empathize with their concern, and that we can help.
HOW do I use them?
If they’re crafted well, you can use your buyer personas in many-many ways. Here are a few ideas to help develop strategies that can get you to earn your persona’s business.
1. Map prospects to personas
To custom-make everything – from sales pitch to your marketing plan. If that’s not easy at the beginning, dip into your persona questionnaire to ask specific questions that can help you do the mapping. For example – “What are your top two aspirations for your child as she moves into being an independent adult?” OR “What health goals are you looking to achieve by choosing plant-based products?”.
When mapped, you can trigger automation rules that place prospects into email campaigns or other sales stages tailored to personas. In fact, using CRMs (like Hub Spot) you can upload your buyer personas to find out the type of marketing, communications or sales copy you’ll need or the best tool to reach them.
2. Paint the right picture
Direct your graphic designers to design visuals that connect with your target consumer. It’ll be like beating a dead horse if we were to tell how important that is but just to reinforce – remember that humans think in images. Right visuals strike the right chord. They drive your consumers to read your content – which, if written well, will encourage them respond to your call for action. It’s all connected. Really.
3. Translate, re-write, compose
your marketing literature to the language your persona understands. The tone, the visuals, channels of communication say a lot. So, also share your persona details with your writers and have them craft a more resonant copy.
Using a segment’s pain point to write an email subject line has proven to be hugely successful – “Is education today getting your child ready for tomorrow?”
4. Build in some clock-work
Use the research on your segment’s purchasing habits to send timely social ads. If you know that your young professionals purchase at night, ramp-up your Facebook advertising during post dinner hours. Strategically post content that appeals to each one of your buyer personas during time slots and days they’re most likely to view them.
5. Navigate through the right channels
Know which social media channels your audience uses – reach them using the right channels. Utilize tools like Google Analytics to see which social networks appear in your referral traffic report or https://keyhole.co/ for referring sites for relevant hashtags.
In toto…
Buyer personas are a powerhouse of very useful information. But in our experience, they are highly under-utilized. Mostly because working with them requires an innate desire to be thorough and meticulous, and not always rely on heuristics or commonly held notions about people and behaviours. In fact, only 44 percent of B2B marketers use personas. The top 44% as a matter of fact.
Invest time and energy in designing these using our easy-to-use and easy-to-customise templates. They will undeniably take you closer to the shoes your customers walk in and give you a nuanced understanding of your their mindset, beliefs, and fears. These, when fed into your marketing and sales efforts, will make your strategies sharp as a tack!
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