In-person buyers are an important part of any effective inbound marketing strategy. The truth is, you need to know who you are marketing to and who you are selling to before you can make a sale.
Today's consumers only pay attention to personalized marketing messages that are highly relevant to their unique experiences.
In-person buyers are an important way to meet consumer needs while simplifying the sales and marketing process so that you only focus on the leads most likely to convert.
We can say the word "buyer persona" as many times as we like, but it won't do you much good if you don't know how to create or define one.
For this reason, we've put together these step-by-step instructions to define your buyer persona. Here you can find out what exactly a buyer persona is and how you can (hopefully) define your buyer persona in a clear and straightforward way step by step. Let's start.
Need To Build a Buyer Persona? Let us help you and show you how you can implement User Research in your company!
What is a buyer person?
The first part of any great guide to defining your buyer persona should be a definition of what a buyer persona really is. In-person buyers are an integral part of any quality sales or marketing plan.
A buyer persona is a fictitious representation of your ideal customer or ideal target group. With a clear picture of who you're marketing to, it's much easier to develop effective, targeted content that speaks to the goals and challenges of your ideal buyer.
Think of your buyer's personas as a personal narrative. Develop a story and context around the people who are most interested in your product or service.
You want to know as much about them as possible so that you can provide personalized service, relevant content, and useful sales information.
Your buyer's people are the best place to organize all of this information into a story that engages you and the rest of your team.
Why are the customer's employees important?
Customers can provide exceptional value and insight to your business.
For example, any member of your team can help:
- Develop a deeper understanding of customer needs and how to address them.
- Drive product development by creating features that help them get the results they want.
- Prioritize which projects, campaigns and initiatives you want to invest time and resources in
- Create company-wide alignment and bring other teams together in a customer-centric vision
As a result, you will be better equipped to serve your customers and provide them with a superior experience that will keep them coming back.
But if you don't define the characteristics of your customers, all aspects of the product development process, user experience, and marketing campaigns suffer. Much has been written about creating a client character. But it takes a long time to go through all the noise to find the best resources.
User person types
Over time, different approaches have been developed to define and implement people. Remember that people are more than people. These are fictional patterns of behavior, motivation, attitudes, real goals, and more than one target user related to your product or business experience.
1. Goal-oriented user personality
Goal-oriented character is probably the concept people are most familiar with. (It is also based on Alan Cooper's perspectives mentioned above). It goes straight to the point and focuses on what the user wants to do with their product or experience.
In other words, your company has a product that people are using. The goal of this character is, therefore, to study how a user would achieve his goals when interacting with his product.
2. Role-based user personality
The role-based character is also behavioral, but slightly different. This character tries to examine the roles that users usually play in real life, their organization, their community, and so on. Examining the roles people play in your daily life can help you make product and design decisions.
3. Integration of the user's personality
The attractive character is different from the others in that the idea is to create a 3D representation of a user through the use of characters.
It may seem odd, but the more people interact with the character and perceive him as real, the more likely he is to be taken into account during the design process.
This character examines the user's emotions and uses their psychology to make decisions about the activity in question.
Creating user persona for your business
User characters are based on research, both qualitative and quantitative. As a general rule, analyzes and surveys provide a better understanding of how much and who.
This data can be used to create character segments that represent many users and provide demographic information to help determine the scope and extent of the trends and patterns that are seen in the data.
However, the interviews focus on why and how. Storytelling and storytelling, facilitated by individual conversations, help to create an accurate and correct portrait of users, as well as scenarios that reveal the contexts of use.
How to define your buyer's personas in 5 steps
Defining the personas of your buyer can be a daunting and arduous task.
But if we break the process down into manageable steps, you can go through them one by one to develop detailed and thoughtful buyer characters that will really improve your method of marketing and sales.
And don't think that you have to create all of your buyer's personas at once; step-by-step is a great way to make sure you've covered all the basics without feeling overwhelmed.
1: Use your buyers to develop personalized digital sales and marketing strategies
When you know your buyers and understand their roles, goals, and challenges, you can develop sales and marketing strategies tailored to the people you think will be the perfect fit for your business.
You've done everything you can to create these Buyer Personas, now is the time to use them!
- Help your sales and marketing teams get acquainted with each person
- Create ad campaigns that match each person's favorite platform.
- Develop content that addresses the specific weaknesses and challenges of your buyer personas.
- Take Stock of Your Existing Content: Is it targeting one or more of your personalities? Otherwise, make some changes.
- Optimize your landing pages to speak to buyers and in their language.
Buyer Personas gives you deep insight into how your most qualified prospects work.
From their favorite social media platforms to how they talk about their career goals, you know a lot about these characters and can use that information to your advantage and yours.
Work on creating content that these people will read and develop sales and marketing strategies that focus on buyer people's goals and challenges.
When you write, market and sell with real people, your most qualified prospects, you will see significant growth.
02: Focus on Roles, Goals, and Challenges
Take a second. You have just written a comprehensive and creative story about one of the ideal buyers for your business. Pat yourself on the shoulder and have a coffee, you deserve it.
Back from the coffee break? Fantastic. We will take a close look at the story we just created and select the parts that are most relevant to your future sales and marketing teams.
This information is divided into three categories: roles, objectives, and challenges.
Roles
You have a complete written picture of who your buyer is, what they do, and what they want. Look at this story and extract information related to their "roles."
Sure, this will be content relevant to your position and role at work, but you can also talk about your role at home or outside of work.
Are you regular volunteers? A father? Do you drive people at work? All of this information gives you context on what he's really good at. It also tells your sales and marketing teams what they are doing.
Once you know what a person does and what role they play in your life, you can create content that addresses those specific roles.
Goals
Understanding what your buyers want is key to providing them with the marketing content and sales services that will really help them.
Perhaps your buyer is looking for ways to improve the profitability of your business. Perhaps their goal is to grow in the company and they seek initiatives that embody their leadership qualities.
On the contrary, your buyer may be on the brink of retirement and want to do his job well without causing problems until he can safely retire.
Freely extract all the goals you identified in your Buyer Persona and organize them into a section with goals.
Understanding a buyer's goals is essential to providing them with a personalized and helpful service. When your team understands what a person is trying to achieve, even if it is not directly related to what your company offers, they can better tailor their methods and strategies to that person.
Challenges
The Challenges of a Buyer section is the most important. Here he identifies the weak points of the personality of each buyer. And when you understand your buyer's vulnerabilities, you can work to address them. Look at this long story you wrote for your buyer.
What prevents you from achieving your goals? What parts of your job are difficult? Are you having trouble selling initiatives to your boss? Are you afraid of big investments? Are they so busy that they can't even think about how they could improve their business?
Need To Build a Buyer Persona? Let us help you and show you how you can implement User Research in your company!
Whatever your challenges, this is the place to go to tackle them. Also, take the time to be specific. The more challenges you can identify for each character, the more opportunities you have to find solutions.
And the more solutions you offer, the more attractive and useful your business will be to these qualified prospects.
03: segment your Buyer Personas
I'll be honest, the investigation step is the longest. Once you've figured that out, you can step back and take a break. Leave this investigation alone and let it marinate for a while.
When you return, you will have everything you need to start writing the personalities of your buyers.
Organize your information
Okay, now that you're up to date and ready to work with these buyers again, it's time to do all the research. You have probably learned a lot from many of your clients. Look for similarities in the goals and challenges you discovered in your research.
These similarities, what customers and prospects are looking for in your business or product, will help you group all of the many potential customers into different buyers.
Decide how many buyers you will have
Once you've verified and organized your research, you can now determine how many buyers you actually define. It's good to remember that you don't have to cover all of them now.
Segment buyers of people by sector
Some companies work with clients from various industries. In a situation where you sell a variety of products, each of which corresponds to a different industry, it may make sense to have a buyer personality for each industry you serve.
It's good to know that it's only worth it if customers in each industry have different goals or weaknesses.
For example, suppose you manufacture a product that is useful in both the automotive and marine industries.
If your customers in the shipping industry have different goals than the auto industry, it makes sense to have two buyer personas.
However, if your product helps both marine and automotive manufacturers, helping them streamline processes, produce more efficiently, and develop a better product, it probably doesn't make as much sense to scrutinize your buyers for segment the industry.
In this case, let's take a look at the second way that customers tend to segment their buyer personas.
Buyer persona by job title
For many companies, regardless of the industry in which they work, their sales process remains the same. At Evenbound, we primarily work with manufacturers, home builders, and construction professionals.
While customers in each of these industries are fundamentally different, they do the same when looking for a marketing partner.
Therefore, we have segmented our Buyer Persons to match the jobs our sales process affects. It often works the same with manufacturers.
For example, suppose you are manufacturing a product that is useful in a variety of industries, but is used more frequently by a senior engineer in any company, regardless of industry.
In this situation, it does not make sense to have a buyer personality for every engineer in every industry because they have the same goals and weaknesses.
Instead, you can write a Buyer Person and then use this Buyer Person as a guide when later writing industry-specific content.
04: Create a name and story for your buyer persona
He completed his research and decided which buyers to start with. Pick one and let's start writing.
Everyone writes differently, so do what is right for you. It's always easier for me to build a complete picture of your buyer persona and then extract the key segments of the final personality that you share with the rest of your team.
Who is your buyer?
Start by giving your buyer a name. The goal of defining buyer personas is to help you market and sell more personally. When you name your Buyer Persons, it gets personal. Once you have a name in mind, start typing what you find in your search.
- How old are you?
- What job titles could they have?
- Where do you live?
- What hobbies do you have and what do you like to do outside of work?
- What are your professional goals? Do you want to evolve or do you just want to retire?
The answers to all these questions and others that come to mind will help you put your buyer persona's goals and motivations into context.
The better you understand what they want and why they want it, the better you can interact with them in the future.
Give yourself a complete profile to work
When it comes to buyers, it is always better to have more information. Accept the challenge of free writing. Set a timer for 15-20 minutes and write down everything you know about this buyer.
And don't be afraid to get a little creative! People Connect with Stories: The more real your buyers are to your sales and marketing teams, the better they can align their efforts to support your customers in real life.
So start writing and see what you can do to make it fun. You can remove content at any time, but it's nice to let your creativity run free and get a complete picture of that buyer persona. The more content you have, the easier the next step will be.
05: Find Your Buyer's People
All great people start with a little research. Even if you think you already know most of your clients, it's worth taking a close look at not only who you already work with, but also who you would like to work with.
Who will buy you?
It is always easier to start with what you know. Begin your research by looking at your existing customers. Here are some questions to get you started:
- Who from your company contacted you first?
- Were you the one who made the final decision?
- How is your job?
- Are you the privileged interlocutor of your company?
- What are your roles at work?
- Do you manage people or processes?
- Do they have to answer to a boss or supervisor, or do they make most of the decisions?
- How is your private life?
- Do you have any hobbies?
- How old are you?
- Are you married or single? Children or not children?
These questions will get you started, but there are some other tactics you may want to consider when finding a buyer:
Talk to customer-centric employees
Your account managers have the best information about their clients' lives because they are in direct contact with them. Talk to your own customer business contacts to get a better idea of who your company is already working with.
Talk to your clients
If it can be done, talking to some of your existing clients is also a good idea. Consider sending a quick survey to your top contacts and asking them questions about yourself.
You may need to include a small message to complete it, but your responses are golden.
After all, the people who have already invested in your product or service are your ideal target group.
Who do you want to buy from?
Once you have gathered as much information as possible about your existing customers, think about who you want to sell to in the future. Is there an ideal perspective that your sales and marketing team just can't implement?
Perhaps your competition is doing well in a particular market segment that you want to enter. To determine who you want to buy from, we recommend that you first take a look at your competition.
Where did your competition go?
Are your competitors having a lot of success in a certain market segment that you would like to conquer? Take a look at their website!
You are probably developing content and sales offerings that directly target this market. You can learn a lot about ideal buyers that you haven't yet discovered just by seeing how your competition is doing.
Where should your business grow?
Another great way to identify buyers for clients you have not yet found is to think carefully about where you want your business to grow. For example, we often work with home builders, many of whom are trying to enter higher markets.
Although they do not yet have customers in this high-end market, we are still working to do as much research as possible on these buyers.
We take a look at our clients' competition to see what they are doing to enter that market, and we look specifically at those buyers to see what interests them the most and what their size is. Problems often arise.
You can do the same with your business. Take a look at the customers you want to attract in the future and do the same research to find out what interests them, what their life is like, and what challenges they may face for your business.
See your own analysis
Our third and final suggestion for the research phase of defining your buyer's personas is to look at their analytics. You won't find better, more concrete data on your ideal buyers than with your own website analytics, social media ads, and pay-per-view-per-click ad campaigns.
Check your reports and pay close attention to the demographics of the people who click on your ads. By looking at your website analytics, you can see which pages your visitors visit most often and for the longest time.
Are there some content offerings that are downloaded more frequently than others? Who downloads these offers? The answers to all these questions give you the useful information and data you need to create relevant and effective buyers.
Need To Build a Buyer Persona? Let us help you and show you how you can implement User Research in your company!