How a Buyer Persona Can Catapult Your Business
You may think a buyer persona is something that just helps your marketing team. But we’d like to show you how going through the exercise of creating a buyer persona together as a company (not just marketing) can help catapult your business.
First off, let’s define what a buyer persona is and why having one (or multiple) matters to your organization.
What is a Buyer Persona?
In its simplest definition, a buyer persona is a research-based profile that depicts a target customer. Buyer personas describe who your ideal customers are, what their days are like, the challenges they face and how they make decisions.
Beyond that, a buyer persona should also reveal what’s going on in their thought process, what their barriers are and how they measure success.
The goal of having this detailed information is to give your organization a clear understanding of who your customer is, what expectations they have of you, what message will resonate with them, and how you can serve them better.
Why is a Buyer Persona Valuable?
There is value in both the process of creating buyer personas and having the final profile.
As your organization goes through the process of creating buyer personas, you will inevitably discover things about your buyers that you didn’t know. These new insights can be used by marketing, sales, and product departments to make informed decisions and smarter investments, such as:
- Where to guide product development
- What kinds of content to create
- How to follow up on leads
- How to deal with certain matters related to customer acquisition and retention
The valuable insights gained by going through the process of creating a buyer persona help ensure that all activities involved in acquiring and serving your customers are tailored to the targeted buyer’s needs.
That may sound obvious, but it’s surprising how many companies focus more on themselves and what they do instead of what their customer needs.
How a Buyer Persona can influence your business.
The best way a buyer persona can help your organization is to share your findings with each department and use what you gathered to influence better data-driven decisions.
Here are a few examples of how that may play out.
- Your product development team can use buyer personas to build product roadmaps. The insights can help them identify and prioritize changes to your offering based on what your customers need the most.
- Marketing can use buyer personas to build effective strategies, including keyword research, creating relevant copy, and identifying promotional activities.
- Buyer personas can help your sales team build rapport with potential customers by understanding their challenges and decision-making process.
- Customer support teams can also use personas to better serve your customers with more empathy by understanding the problems your customers are trying to solve with your product.
For even more ideas, Hubspot created an article suggesting 14 ways you can put your buyer persona to work for your business.
Getting started.
There are a lot of methods to gather research and create a buyer persona (and we’ll cover those in more detail in a later post), but here are a few resources that may be helpful if you’re just getting started.
- Hubspot has a great, easy-to-use template along with questions that help capture a lot of great points.
- SEMrush (a powerful SEO and content marketing tool) also has a template along with ways to gather data in this article.
- Nothing gets you better data than customer interviews, here is an extensive list of resources to help you master the customer interview.
- Want to make your buyer persona stand out? Adobe has you covered with highly designed and editable templates.
If you’d like to go deeper into this topic, feel free to reach out and we can give you a hand.
