E-commerce Marketing

Buyer Personas: The Foundation Of Your Marketing Strategy

A well-designed buyer persona unveils valuable insight into how buyers make purchase decisions. In addition, it encourages a decision-maker in refining ad campaigns, content creation, efficient and aligned product development, along with marketing problem-solving. Thus, your personas are a foundational, strategic tool in making decisions, generously affecting your business growth…

By Shrishti Jain
September 10, 2021

Introduction to Buyer Personas

In any business, there is great value in identifying what an ideal consumer would be like. Therefore, you need buyer personas because they provide a frame of reference while devising a marketing strategy. A buyer persona is a much more defined and focused profile of your business's target customer. It is a partly fictional depiction to help you understand their perspectives and thus better fulfil their needs efficiently. Understanding buyer personas is crucial to encouraging content creation, product development, sales follow up, and literally anything related to customer acquisition plus retention. Knowing them inside-out, their motivations or the problems they're struggling with enables you to modify marketing messages to meet your target audience's specific needs, behaviours, and concerns.

Benefits of Creating Buyer Personas

Buyer personas allow you to focus on customers' behaviour and habits. Furthermore, they help ensure that all activities involved in acquiring and serving your customers are tailored to the targeted buyer's needs. Gaining trust as a business requires subtle but significant shifts in the way you present yourself. Creating and continually utilising buyer personas to guide your business keeps you centred in customers' minds. With efficient marketing efforts, your campaigns hit the right target with less 'waste', often leading to more sales without additional efforts or costs on your part. Time is money, and buyer personas help you save both. Identifying your customers' pain points helps you to better prepare for and overcome their potential objections. You can personalise your content accordingly and prepare your marketing campaigns.

Structuring Buyer Personas

Buyer personas can be created through research, surveys, and interviews, all with a mix of prospects, customers, and those outside your contacts database who might align with your target audience. Here's how you can create fool-proof buyer personas:

Learn About Your Customers: Uncover trends about how specific leads or customers find and consume your content. Use form fields that catch relevant persona information when creating forms to add to your website.
Segment Your Customers: It's predicted that 3-4 personas generally account for more than 90% of a business's sales, but regardless of whether you have one or many, the key is to make sure that your buyer personas are as defined and accurate as possible.
Identify Negative Personas: Negative persona represents who you don't want as a customer, be it professionals who are too advanced for your offerings or customers who are too expensive to acquire.

Buyer Personas Use Cases 1/2

One of the best parts of creating a buyer persona is that it helps you gain customer insights and cross-departmental alignment, ensuring that marketing, sales, product development and customer support — all teams have the same view of your ideal customer. In addition, marketing teams can use buyer personas to develop effective strategies. When building content marketing strategies, for instance, personas are crucial. They help to direct keyword research efforts and are used as a reference when crafting copy. They can also serve in the identification and prioritisation of promotional activities. Creating buyer personas can further help your sales team to build a rapport with potential clients. Your sales team will be much more effective by understanding what the prospect is dealing with and being prepared to fix their concerns. Lastly, customer support teams can adopt these personas to serve your customers better. The team can show more empathy by resolving customers' problems, and their frustration caused when things don't work out. Little compassion can go a great distance when dealing with an enraged customer.

Buyer Personas Use Cases 2/2

Buyer personas can go beyond digital marketing and advance onto better branding, product development and after-sales support services. It's meant for decisive and strategic planning for the entire company. After having your tools in place, you can do everything from redesigning your website to launching a new brand or rebranding by consulting your personas for insights into what your target audience will relate with and what could capture their interest. Organisations can more easily build the features that suit their customers' needs. First, consider core customers' goals, desires, and limitations to guide feature, interface, and design choices. After determining your personas, it is time to use this knowledge to upsell and cross-sell. Being aware of a customer's purchase history, you can also provide valuable recommendations based on their previous purchases.

Final Words

Buyer personas are amazingly versatile - any element of your business that interacts with customers or influences them can benefit from utilising buyer personas. With them, it’s practically possible to know how to market your product to speak to customers’ pain points and needs or how to reach them to build awareness and drive them to your website. You are now armed with the essential details to research and create your own buyer personas. So take your time to do the quantitative and qualitative research and develop buyer personas based on real customer insight, as it will surely pay off in the long run!