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How Buyer Personas Are Used To Attract Customers
Did you know that January 16th is the first official “Day of Knowing your Customer” in 2020? Yes, it is an actual national day that takes place every third Thursday of each quarter. The day reminds marketers and small business owners across the globe that understanding your ideal customer (buyer personas) is an integral part of attracting customers to your small business.
Why Are Buyer Personas Important?
Buyer persona profiles help you to understand who your customers on a personal level. Understanding these profiles will allow you to attract the specific types of individuals to your business that are most likely to become a paying customer. Defining your ideal customer by creating your company’s buyer persona profiles is the most important part of your marketing and sales strategies.
What Are Buyer Personas…Exactly?
Think for a moment, a personal profile of any type will give you a better idea about who a person is right? In the same way, a buyer persona profile gives you a better idea about the types of products/services your customer is interested in purchasing and what type of marketing and advertising content your business should create to reach them.Your buyer persona profile should include the following information;
- location
- age
- job title
- income
- hobbies
- motivations or goals
- purchasing habits
- pain points and challenges
If you are developing a profile for a B2B customer, it should also include data like, the size of the business, number of employees, or annual turnover.
“Once created, buyer personas will save you time and allow you to generate more sales for your business.”
Creating The Best Buyer Personas
Creating a buyer persona is not guesswork. You will need solid and authentic data about your existing and prospective customers to develop this type of profile. Follow these six proven ways to gather this data in order to create an accurate buyer persona.
1. Communicate with your sales team
Your sales and marketing teams know your customers better than anyone in your company. Since they’re the ones who spend the most time communicating with them, then it’s likely they know them on a much more personal level. Thus, it is necessary to bring these two teams together in order to get a full picture of customer traits before you start organizing customer information.
Ask the team members to list the most common questions that they receive from prospects and customers about your products or services. Dig deeper to pull out the information that outlines your customer’s pain points and challenges. Pain points and challenges will tell you more about why your customers use your products or service, what “whole” does it fill in their business or personal life.
Learning about what problems they are using your products or service to solve will allow you to utilize this information in advertising campaigns, marketing content and sales conversations. The company that addresses the pain points and challenges of its target audience will succeed at attracting more ready-to-buy customers. This type of information transforms your marketing campaigns, to make the content feel like a one-to-one personal conversation with prospects and customers.
2. Conduct customer based surveys
The best buyer persona profiles include personal and professional information. Sales and marketing teams may be able to provide some insight into who is your ideal customer, however talking directly to your customer is even better.
You can apply the Voice of Customer strategy to know exactly what your customer is thinking. It offers a “Detailed understanding of the customer’s requirements” and “Common language for going forward in product and service development, etc.”.
An example profile by Sanford customer reviews found a few simple questions can reveal a lot.
- Tell me your favorite online forum
- What does your typical day look like?
- Who influences you the most?
- What are your business goals for second quarter?
3. Review the analytical data you have
If you do not have direct access to your customers, the organic traffic on your website can be a great source of information. Google Analytics helps to analyze site visitor data so that you can learn more about what they’re interested in most.
An analysis of your website analytics data will give you an idea about the following;
- Age & Gender
- Interests
- Geo-location
- Site Behavior – which pages (products and services) are they most interested in?
- Technology Used
This data will allow you to see which content on your website your customer is most interested in learning more about. The data can also allow you to see what pages on your website are converting the most leads into customers. Thus, turn on the “Sessions with Conversions” in the analytics dashboard in order to see actual traits of the customers who are converting.
4. Rigorous research
Although a customer survey can provide a plethora of information, requesting that customers complete them doesn’t always work. Don’t lose hope, you still have the ability to learn more.
There are numerous sources available online that you can use to find the answers to your questions. Access public data sources, research papers, online forums, existing customer social media profiles and more. Rely on a few online sources like Linkedin and Glassdoor for business data. Quora is ideal when searching for some of the most popular questions asked by individuals who use your types of products or services.
The key to successfully gathering information to construct your persona profiles is to include as much pertinent information as possible. You can sort through the collected information in order to find trends and commonalities in the data later. It is the trends and commonalities that you will use to construct your final buyer persona profile.
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5. Store the buyer persona in CRM
Gathering, sorting and referring back to your customer profile data can get messy if you don’t have some sort of organizational plan. In this step, we’ll discuss turning the collected information into an actual useable resource for your team. This step is how you all will be able to best maximize the use of this information in an orderly manner.
How do you store and access this large amount of data?
The solution is Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. You can store all the survey data, analysis, and many more in a CRM. Our recommendation is to use Hubspot, many companies use this platform to store this type of customer profile info so that each team member can easily access and utilize the available information.
CRMs allow you to store this info in an orderly manner as seen in the image below.
This profile will work as a reference for your sales and marketing team that can be updated when trends in data change.
Customer success depends on the concept that the customer profile is a reference, not a so much a “real person”. The persona profile is a representation of your ideal customer that your teams can use to communicate with your audience.
6. Constructing your profiles
Start with the basics first, you can be tempted to dive into profile development immediately after you’ve gathered some data. Resist this urge. Take the time to search for trends in your data in order to cut down on the amount of information you’ve collected. Pick the data that will be most useful to add to your buyer persona profile
What are going to do with the rest of the data? Well, it may be helpful to use this data to create an additional buyer persona. Ideally, each business should have at least 3 buyer personas. There is no limit to the number of personas you can have, but you should take care to ensure that your buyer persona profiles do not overlap as far as the data is concerned.
The Benefits of Buyer Personas
Marketing and sales teams create customer profiles for many reasons;
- To enhance their brand loyalty and sales
- Create brand awareness
- Better communicate with prospects and customers
- Drive quality, ready-to-buy traffic to company website.
Yes, these profiles may take some time to create, but the benefit to your bottom line will greatly outweigh the time you’ve contributed to creating your personas. These are time-saving tools that allow you to find and target customers online in a much more effective way. Once created, buyer personas will save you time and allow you to generate more sales for your business.
Better Identify Sales Opportunities
Carefully constructed buyer personas = better leads. These new leads mean more sales opportunities for your business. You have the ability to utilize the ultimate tool for identifying these new sales opportunities.
On average, 25 out of 100 site visitors will be your target audience. Only 2 – 5% of the 25 will actually contact you to learn more or make a purchase. It may sound frustrating but with the help of buyer personas, your team can create the website and content that will help convert more leads into customers.
