The Buyer Persona: Dope When Done Right
BUYER PERSONA? WHAT IS IT?
It’s a tool to identify and visualize your target audience.Buyer personas are meant to be fictional representations your ideal potential buyers.
When done correctly, they can help you better understand what drives a customer purchase, how to communicate with them what barriers they might have along the way.
WHY ARE THEY ESSENTIAL TO BUSINESS?
CLARITY + FOCUS:
Buyer personas should be based on your potential customers. The more ideal you paint them, the more clarity you gain on prospects who might not be the best fit. Attraction by subtraction.
COMMUNICATION
Successful buyer personas help creative effective communication across teams. When leadership, sales, marketing, and development teams can all agree on a persona, they become the standard for processes across the board.
EFFICIENCY:
Marketing messages, sales communication and internal dialogue become efficient.
THE BIGGEST MISTAKE PEOPLE MAKE WITH BUYER PERSONAS
The biggest (and most dangerous) mistake companies make is creating too many buyer personas. You can’t have a target audience if the target is all of the rings plus the bulls eye.
So how many should you have? 3-5. Most companies that have successful personas limit themselves to that. But here are some key ways to identify if you’re missing the mark and crossing the threshold:
TITLES ONLY: if your buyer personas have morphed to include every single job title your visitor might have, then it’s useless. Instead, consider their motivations, psychographics, locations, or life events to differentiate different personas.
THEY DON’T SOLVE BUSINESS PROBLEMS: don’t get caught up with the definitions of your persona with unnecessary details like hair color, the type of pets they have. Stay with attributes relevant towards the problem you’re trying to solve.
NOBODY REFERS TO THEM: if your personas are sitting on a shelf collecting dust, they weren’t done in a way that was going to impact your business. It’s ok to start over - the more time spent refining will pay dividends.
HOW TO CREATE GREAT BUYER PERSONAS THAT WILL HELP YOUR BUSINESS
First, get all the stakeholders in a room including upper management, marketing, and sales. Each will provide their own insight on the ideal customer. Also, balance out what your future vision of the company is with what is currently working well today.
Traffic Tupac wants people to holler if they hear him. He wants more lead generation and conversion opportunities.
IDENTIFY AN IDEAL CLIENT: What' makes a client a great fit? Wha’s the best new customer you recently closed?
IDENTIFY MOTIVATORS + PAIN POINTS: What drives new clients to your business? What are they having trouble with? What events lead them to you?
IDENTIFY THE SALES CYCLE: Where do they start the research process? What’s their timeline? When do they need help from sales?
IDENTIFY DEMOGRAPHICS: We’ve narrowed down the “why”, now determine the “who”. Where to they work? Job title? Education? Salary? Spending habits? Age?
CATEGORIZE LIKENESSES: Spend time finding similarities between personas and segmenting groups together.
VERIFY THE PERSONAS: Interview real people and members of your team to verify your findings. Ask them the same questions and confirm the responses. How close were you to the target?
CREATE A PERSONA DOCUMENT: Using all the data that you collected, create a templated persona document that effectively communicates your ideal personas. If you don’t have a template, use ours! Download it for free here.
RINSE + REPEAT: Taking all these steps won’t mean you’re done, this is an evolving process that should be treated as a living, breathing plant or tree. As your company grows and matures, so too will your personas. Keep on.
CONCLUSION
Congratulations, you are a step closer to landing your G.O.A.T. customer. Now that you have your buyer personas, time to unleash them into the wild. Use them as a guideline to help you better communicate with your prospects.
Need help with developing your buyer persona? Give HADJI Studios a shout. We can help paint your buyer persona so that you can better understand your audience and develop a solid strategy to get their attention. To get started, schedule a free 20min ideation call. LFG.
