A full understanding of your target audience is an important requirement for running a successful startup. Without such understanding, you can’t meet those audiences’ needs, which is crucial to growing your business. Understanding your target audience can help you align their goals and needs with your services, delivering the best experience and building an irreplaceable brand.
Buyer personas are what help you fully understand your leads and customers. However, many have a love-hate relationship with them. They know they need to create and use them, but they find personas difficult to develop.
Truly, creating personas can be tricky. Especially if you haven’t created them before. That is why we have created this detailed guide to help you create buyer personas that’ll help you achieve desired growth for your brand.
Make sure to download our free buyer persona kit to make creating your personas simple.
WHAT ARE BUYER PERSONAS?
Buyer personas are fictionalized depictions of your ideal clients based on data and research. They are also known as customer personas, audience personas, or marketing personas. They assist you in concentrating your efforts on clients and consumers that are crucial to the success of your startup.
Personas may help you gain a thorough understanding of your target market, which is essential for driving content production, product development, sales follow-up, and anything else that has to do with acquiring and keeping customers.
With your buyer personas, you’ll be able to attract high-value visitors, leads, and customers to your business who you’ll be more likely to retain over time.
Before we dive into the creative process of buyer personas, let’s understand the impact of well-developed buyer personas on your business.
WHY ARE BUYER PERSONAS IMPORTANT?
Buyer personas help you understand your leads and customers better. With buyer personas, it will be simpler for you to modify your content, marketing, products, and services to address the unique wants, habits, and concerns of your target audience.
When you use buyer personas you can:
● Directly address problems customers are experiencing. Solving problems for your customers is an important part of your business. With customer personas, you will know exactly what these problems are and how you can help your target audience solve them with your product, content, services, etc.
● Focus on important marketing goals and streamline marketing efforts. As a startup, it’s easy to get lost in the ever-increasing possibilities of marketing your product(s). It can be difficult to choose among the plethora of online and offline marketing options. Buyer personas help you make choosing marketing channels easy.
● Target the right people with your marketing campaigns. One of the most crucial aspects of any marketing effort, whether outbound or inbound, is choosing the appropriate target audience. This directly affects how well that campaign performs. Personas will help you target the right people when creating content or running ads, resulting in a good return on investment (ROI).
● Decide what product/features to develop and/or what services to offer. When creating new products or incorporating new features into current ones, personas can aid in making well-informed judgments. This will enable you to give your consumers the greatest possible experience.
● Tap into the feelings and emotions of your ideal customers in your brand messaging. Writing great copy that engages your target audiences requires having well-developed customer profiles. After you understand how your buyers feel before and after they employ your service, you can evoke those feelings with your brand messaging.
● Speak to the life goals your customers care about. Personas help you understand the motivations behind your consumers’ behavior. You will have attention-grabbing content if you can tie your brand messaging and content to those motivations.
These are just a few of the many important things customer personas help with.
HOW TO CREATE YOUR BUYER PERSONAS
The strongest buyer personas are based on market research as well as insights you gather from your team and actual customer base (through surveys, interviews, etc.).
Follow these steps to create your buyer personas:
Step 1: Research and gather data and information
You need a variety of data and information that ranges from demographic, socioeconomic, psychographic, goals, pain points, questions, etc.
Below are some credible sources of data for persona development:
1. Demographic/socioeconomic: Through customer surveys or interviews, business trend reports, government statistics, etc., you can gather information on your ideal client’s age, gender, education level, income level, and other factors.
2. Psychographics: Customer behavior is directly influenced by things like habits, values, and interests, and information about these things can be gathered through one-on-one interviews, social media platforms, customer surveys, buying platforms, forums, blogs, media kits, etc.
3. Questions and pain points: The internal customer support department, blog comments, social media comments, the sales team, and other internal departments can all be consulted for pertinent client inquiries, pain points, and issues. These can also be gathered from websites like Quora, Yahoo Answers, Wiki Answers, and so on.
4. Goals and motivations: these can be collected from customer surveys or interviews, social media platforms, forums, Quora, yahoo answers, etc
5. Buying patterns and services required: these data can be collected from internal company reports and your customer relationship management system (CRM).
In case you want to conduct an interview and need a questionnaire, a free buyer persona questionnaire template is included in the free buyer persona downloadable kit.
Step 2: Organise collected data into personas
After conducting your study, you’ll have access to a wealth of important raw data regarding your present, and prospective customers. You’ll then combine these raw facts to create succinct, comprehensive profiles that everyone in your organization will be able to understand and find useful.
The best way to do this is to use the downloaded buyer persona template to organize the information you’ve gathered into personas. Then share these personas with the rest of your team so everyone can benefit from the research you’ve done and develop an in-depth understanding of the people they’re targeting every day at work.
Every department from marketing to sales, customer support, and design will benefit a lot from using the personas you create.
Here’s how to work through the steps involved in creating your buyer personas with our free, downloadable template in detail. The template has space for two personas, primary and secondary. These are usually enough when you’re just starting. However, if you need more than 2 personas, simply duplicate any one of the primary or secondary slides. So, fill in your persona’s:
1. Demographic and psychographic information: Age, gender, education, marital status, income, geography, channels, technology, and other details are crucial components of your profile that you should fill out first.
2. Dreams and Goals: Jot down the aspirations and objectives of your target audience. With them, you can adjust your service delivery to support them in achieving their objectives and build your brand language to speak directly to their desires. You’re one step closer to creating an irreplaceable brand.
3. Pain points and challenges: As previously stated, resolving customer issues is an important aspect of any business. Document the pain points and challenges that your target audience faces, as revealed by your research so that every member of your organization is aware of them.
4. How you can empower them: Identifying and documenting your target audience’s problems isn’t enough. Work with all customer-facing departments in your organization — marketing, sales, customer support, finance, design, and so on — to determine how you can best serve and empower your target audience.
Step 3: Update and improve
Your customer personas should be living documents that change and evolve as you learn more about your leads and customers. They should not be lifeless customer profiles created once and then pulled out for quarterly meetings. So, for maximum effectiveness, make sure to constantly update and improve them.
HOW TO USE YOUR BUYER PERSONAS
All customer-facing departments in your organization — marketing, sales, customer support, finance, design, property development, etc. — can make adequate use of the buyer personas you create.
As an example, with your buyer personas:
● The marketing team creates hyper-targeted marketing campaigns, resulting in a high return on investment (ROI) and lower marketing budget overhead.
● By removing potential objections from your customers, your sales team closes more deals.
● The finance team tailors payment methods to the strength of your target audience’s members.
● Product development teams can quickly create products and/or features that are appealing to your target audience.
● Because they are familiar with the channels your customers use, the customer support team can quickly respond to urgent customer issues.
● The design team creates brand and marketing collateral that appeals to and attracts your ideal customers.
All of these still apply to you if your startup is in the SAAS industry or not. The use of buyer personas for the growth of your startup is almost limitless.
FINAL THOUGHTS
By removing all uncertainty, buyer personas enable you to customize your service to the needs of the customers who matter to the success of your brand. Now that you know how to make and use them, go ahead and create your own by following the steps we outlined. Place them in a repository (online preferably) where everyone in your organization can easily access them.
Is there anything we’ve forgotten? What are your thoughts on buyer personas? How do you believe they can benefit your company? Please leave a comment.
Contact us if you’re stuck on your buyer personas or need a second set of eyes. Our expert brand strategists are always happy to talk about how we can help you connect with your ideal customers.