How and Why You Should Create Buyer Personas for Your Business

Buyer Personas 101:

– Do you know what keeps your Prospects up at night? Do you know what motivates them to go into work every day? ?Do you care?

If not, you should. The answers to these questions are vital to effectively targeting and selling your products or services.

What Are Buyer Personas?

A Buyer Persona is a fictional person created to represent your key buyers. They are created to help you understand the buyer’s goals, concerns, preferences and limitations. They help internalize the ideal customer your company is trying to attract. It also helps each company member relate to these customers as real humans, regardless of the department and role in the company.

How Do You Create a Buyer Persona?

Creating Buyer Personas isn?t as daunting as it may seem. While it does require research, it does not necessarily mean years of focus groups, data and interviews. While those are still relevant to marketing, creating a Buyer Persona can mean simply interviewing a few key people.

Customers: Reach out to your existing AND former customers (yes, even the unhappy ones). Find out why they love your product (or hate) and ask them how smooth the transition was from Prospect to Customer. This will help you develop a solid understanding of where the glitches are in your sales process as well as the quality of your products.

Other things to ask (Reference: HubSpot?s Buyer Personas Worksheet):

• Demographic information
• Job and level of seniority
• What does a day in their life look like
• What are their paint points
• What do they value most
• Where do they go for information
• What experience are they looking for when seeking out products/services
• What are their most common objections to your products/services

Why are Buyer Personas Important to Companies?

• They align both marketing and sales teams: Marketing and sales departments typically have very different ways of communicating with prospects. Marketing focuses on getting leads and Sales aims to close the deal. By creating these Buyer Personas, you enhance brand alignment and the ability to speak the same language (literally and figuratively) to these personas. If both Marketing and Sales knows what each buyer would like to accomplish, then everyone is on the same page and it eliminates the possibility of broken communication.
• Better results: Both B2B and B2C companies should be implementing best practices to become buyer focused. Those companies that have (especially B2B companies), consistently outperformed competitors. Those companies that incorporated Buyer Personas into an overall plan to achieve customer centricity experienced the most success.
• New Era, New Markets: The new digital age has opened many doors for companies. Digital technology has allowed companies to reach targets with few barriers. This, however, has also posed as a challenge for companies as they have fallen into some markets unintentionally. Many companies have been forced to address these markets with little knowledge of the buying behavior of Prospects in these markets. Buyer Personas allow for better understanding of potential Customers and allows companies to break down the complexity into insightful understanding in terms of both qualitative and quantitative data.

Common Mistakes

Now that you understand the benefit of having Buyer Personas for your business, it is important to acknowledge some of the mistakes some companies make when creating them.

Do not make them up!

Buyer Personas are fictional characters, but they represent real people. They must be created after real research is completed. You must also continuously tweak them as, like real people, they change every day.

When drafting Personas, it is important to consult several different customers and people within your company. The CEO and intern?s opinions of the drafted Personas will most likely be different. Talk to your people and your customers to find out their interpretations of each persona.

Buyer Personas are essential to your lead-gen. For more insight into lead-gen for your business, download our free eBook:

Marketing Matters Inbound?is an inbound marketing firm specializing in online conversions, content?strategy, PPC campaigns and traditional media placement. Our experience in?B2B digital?marketing?and?traditional media?allows us to deliver results through a strategic media mix. We believe in?aligning and merging marketing and sales/operations for optimal return on your marketing investment.