Do you know who your perfect target audience is? Do you know where and how you can reach these audiences, and what kind of content appeals to them most? If the answer to these questions is no, then you should think about building out some buyer personas as a first step to discovering your target audiences.
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your perfect customer, based on market research paired with educated guesses from looking at customer similarities in your current customer base.
Why are buyer personas important to your business?
Buyer persona mapping is key as the better you know your customers the easier it is to generate new content, develop and improve products and services, and retain new customers. Buyer personas can be used in every department of your business, from sales to marketing, and luckily, they’re super easy to create! We work with all of our new clients to help them build out buyer personas as part of our Hubspot on-boarding process and have developed a fool-proof system to help you get started.
Getting started...
You can create a buyer persona in a few different ways:
- Using market research and/or looking at your current customer base to find similarities in characteristics such as age, gender or interests.
- Creating forms on your blogs and exclusive offers to capture reader’s information to discover any similarities in characteristics the users who read your blog and respond to your offers might have.
- Talking to your sales and marketing teams about any similarities or trends they may have noticed amongst their customers.
- Interviewing current customers, either in person or via a call, to discover their characteristics, and find out more about what they love about your business.
Your buyer personas should aim to capture as many personal details as you can to build a complete customer profile. Where do they live? How old are they? What are their challenges? How can you help them? The end game is to know them better than you know yourself! We often even give each persona a name and a photo to embody that 'buyer' and bring them to life so the team can better think about their audience whenever they're creating new content.
Depending on the size of your business, multiple buyer personas could be required for your different customer bases, however, if you’re new to creating a persona, it’s best to start with just one or two. You can even create negative buyer personas for customers that you don’t want to target to help ensure that any new content or lead generation methods doesn’t attract the wrong kind of attention.
Once you have all of the necessary information about your perfect (or not so perfect) customer, the best thing to do is to centralise it. Impart your newfound wisdom into one place and watch your buyer persona come to life.
Share your persona(s) throughout the business and across all teams, and use this information to tailor your new content, forms and/or lead generation campaigns to your perfect customers in order to increase engagement, and ultimately, leads.
Ready to get started? Learn more by downloading our FREE ebook to create your ideal buyer persona today.
References: