What is a buyer persona?

To define it, a buyer persona is a generalized representation of your ideal customer, based on market research and real data about your existing customers. This persona tells you what prospective customers are thinking and doing and it reveals insights about your buyers’ decisions – the specific attitudes, concerns and criteria that drive prospective customers to choose your business.

A buyer persona is not just a description of your buyer. When you have the insights into what your buyers think about doing business with you, you have the knowledge to align your marketing decisions with their expectations. Personas are useful to everyone – in marketing, sales, product and services – they help us to relate to our customers as real humans. A deep understanding of a buyer persona is critical in driving content creation, product development, sales follow up and anything that relates to customer retention.

So how do you make one? When creating your buyer persona(s), consider your customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. The more detailed you are, the better. By asking the right people the right questions, you can create a persona that offers helpful information to the people in your company that really need it. Sometimes, people are unwilling to divulge information over the phone, where they would through an online survey. It’s worth using a variety of tools to obtain your information.

Why do we need buyer personas? Buyer personas provide tremendous structure and insight for your company, which make it easier for you to tailor your content, messaging and services to a specific group of people. As a result, you will be able to attract the most valuable visitors, leads, and customers to your business. The strongest personas are those based on market research and through surveys or interviews of your actual customer base. You could have two or three personas, or for a large company, as many as 10 or 20!

Here are three benefits of developing a buyer persona for your business:

1. It conveys a stronger message – untargeted marketing tries to target everyone and no one in particular. When you have an identified persona, you can use the language they understand and provide a solution based on their specific needs.
2.  t minimizes advertising waste – using platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook allow you to create highly targeted ads for very specific demographics.
3. It helps you discover your buyer’s objections – if you know what your customers object to, you can address this in your marketing efforts.

Buyer personas are invaluable for your inbound marketing campaign

The team at WSI can tell you all about this – channeling your marketing efforts to a specific group of people will substantially help your marketing campaign. Leaders in digital marketing, WSI has the knowledge to bring a solution to help you reach your goals. Their Inbound Marketing Checklist is just one of their many tools – they offer services from website design, social media marketing, video and email marketing, to mobile and search solutions. Contact WSI to find out more information.