80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalized experiences, so how do marketers understand their customers enough to create these tailored communications?
Buyer personas are robust customer profiles essential to understanding the best audiences to target to ensure marketing campaigns achieve desired results. But you can’t just research customer insights on Google, so how do you obtain this crucial information? To correctly profile your prospective buyers, you must first determine who should be involved in creating your buyer personas.
But first, it’s helpful to understand what a buyer persona is, and how to apply the findings.
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What is a buyer persona, and how is it used?
A buyer persona is a fictional representation of an ideal customer. It models your most common buyers’ psychology and demographics, helping you understand their motivations, interests, and anxieties. A buyer persona can help you tailor your marketing strategies and product offerings to satisfy your ideal customers’ needs.
The most essential factors to find when researching buyer personas:
- What pain points do they want addressed (knowingly or unknowingly)?
- What barriers prevent or discourage them from buying?
- Who is involved in the purchase decision, and who has the final say?
- What trends pop out among your target customer bases?
How is a buyer persona used?
Knowing how to create a buyer persona is one thing, but understanding how to apply this information is crucial to accomplishing sales and marketing goals. Here are typical ways buyer personas inform different business operations:
- Targeted marketing: 78 percent of businesses have found some level of success with personalization. Buyer personas can help you identify and understand your target audience better, enabling you to create more personalized marketing campaigns that resonate with these audiences and address their unique needs.
- Product development: By understanding the behavior of your buyer personas, you can develop products or services that cater to specific pain points, improving the chances of successful adoption and satisfaction.
- Customer experience optimization: Following a buyer persona template can give you insights into your different customer journeys. Use these insights to improve customer experiences and satisfaction.
- Content creation: Buyer personas should guide you when creating relevant and helpful content, including blogs, videos, and social media posts for your target audiences.
The process: Who to involve when creating your buyer personas
1. Anyone who understands or has interacted with your customers: Sales/Marketing Team
Since the sales and marketing team interact with your customers daily and often conduct deep market research to continually improve their approaches, they can give you first-hand information about your customers’ struggles, pain points, and interaction with your products.
2. Anyone who understands the company’s goals: Executive Leadership
Your company’s executive leadership understands business goals better than other stakeholders, making their contribution to defining a buyer persona invaluable. Their deep understanding of the company’s goals and vision enable them to give valuable guidance when creating your buyer personas that align with business objectives.
3. Anyone who has used your products/services: Product Team, Past/Current Customers
Your past and current customers have direct experience using your products, and they can provide you with highly personalized information for building your buyer persona. Consider engaging them in non-intrusive interviews and focus groups that yield invaluable firsthand psychographic insights for your buyer persona.
Every product or service offered has been researched thoroughly to ensure proper demand exists. Ask the engineers on these product teams what factored into their decision making.
Tying it all together
Your buyer persona is one of your most vital tools for effective marketing, so consult the right team to guarantee an accurate representation of your ideal customers. Once you have these factors gathered, create audience segmentations based on these personas to deliver personalized communications optimized for engagement.
Learn why DESelect makes that segmentation easier with a quick drag-and-drop process that saves major time and creates audiences as granular as needed.
