Buyer personas can help you understand your audience and determine their needs. In order to “walk a mile in their shoes”, buyer personas can help create a memorable image about your audience – who they are and some key considerations about what is important to them.
Persona benefits
Personas have many benefits:
- Personas can create a shared language – it improves targeting and grouping.
- Personas allow you to focus on and target for a particular grouping of your audience to help make smarter decisions.
- Personas create empathy towards your audience – improving engagement and conversation about their needs.
Defining personas can help your team become aware of your audience needs.
Research based personas
Although personas can seem very straightforward, many personas don’t focus on the right type of qualities that actually make a difference in the sales process. Instead, they are a built on “guesstimates” of broad personality stereotypes.
For a B2B online buyer persona, the traits and insights that really matter are those that relate to the customer’s work life, their professional objectives and the types of obstacles they encounter that can be addressed by your product or service.
A buyer persona that takes these things into account can be an extremely useful tool for creating content that helps achieve your sales goals.
Useful personas are created by information gathered from salespeople, customer service interactions, and the buyers themselves. These interviews and interactions must focus on what the buyer is trying to achieve and what kinds of things are impeding them.
Some questions that need to be addressed are:
- What are their goals and are there circumstances affecting these goals?
- Is there anything impeding or speeding their need to change?
- How do they go about achieving these goals?
- What do they need to know to embrace change?
- Who do they trust when it comes to information?
- What’s the value they visualize once they make a decision?
- Who do they need to convince in order to make decisions?
- What could cause the need for this change to lose priority?
Personas can be really useful in discovering what potential customers must deal with in order to affect change in their own workplace. When you have a clear idea of all the pathways and common obstacles, you can tailor your content to address specific questions and simplify the path.
Just make sure you are avoiding getting bogged down in too much irrelevant detail and are pinpointing things that are specific to your particular business.
When it comes to sharing a common vision about a customer type, personas make it easy to share information with customer service, sales, product development, and R&D. When all these different departments are involved in the creation of buyer personas, it’s possible to create a marketing tool to support greater ownership and a motivation.
Once you have defined a persona and used them to target content, it will make a difference to both your customers and the bottom line.
