Effective marketing and customer satisfaction for your business require you to understand what drives your target audience. While the members of this group share much in common—interest in your business, pain points, and preferences—this group may not be as uniform as you think. This is where buyer personas come in. In this post we’ll go over what buyer personas are, the role they play in business growth, and how to create buyer personas from your target audience.
What is a Buyer Persona?
As mentioned above, your target audience is comprised of people who share a lot in common. However, when you take a closer look at this group, you may notice some differentiators. They may have a similar end goal but for different reasons, or a similar problem but in different contexts.
For most businesses, their target audience is made up of smaller subgroups, or niche markets. A buyer persona is a fictional character that you create that represent the typical person in each subgroup. Collecting and sorting relevant information about your customers in terms of their demographics, lifestyles, and goals will help you to create valuable buyer personas for your business and your customer base.
How Many Buyer Personas Should I Have?
Larger, more diversified companies tend to attract a greater assortment of customers and will have multiple buyer personas to reflect this – one that represents each unique category of buyers. Smaller businesses, on the other hand, especially those that are niche-specific, may have only one or two.
Example of a Buyer Persona
To help you better understand buyer personas, here’s an example of a buyer persona for XYZ Home Cleaning Services:
Busy Betty is a 38-year old female and single mother of two school-aged children, who works full-time as a human resources manager. She chooses XYZ because if it’s low prices, but more importantly its reliability. Busy Betty has a highly structured schedule, so it’s important that XYZ comes and leaves on time. Busy Betty also uses XYZ because it gives her time to spend with her children on the weekends, that she would otherwise have spent cleaning.
XYZ Home Cleaning Services may have other personas as well, based on the reason they desire or need such services.
Why Your Business Needs Buyer Personas
Buyer personas aren’t just a nice way to organize your customer data. They offer many benefits to your business marketing, growth, and customer loyalty.
Increase Marketing Success
Buyer personas take the mystery out of who’s buying from you and why, allowing you to define your target audience and focus your time and marketing budget accordingly. With buyer personas you can also adjust your content for different personas, such as with ad copy, to resonate with whomever you are targeting more strongly.
Build Connections with Your Entire Audience
Trying to satisfy everyone at once can be rather futile. Focusing on satisfying individual groups, on the other hand, can help you reach this goal. This is one of the fundamentals of niche marketing.
Your business will appeal to different people in your target audience for different reasons. No matter how many buyer personas you have, the more familiar you can get with each persona, the more you can resonate with each of them and appeal to what’s most important to each group. Building your relationships with the many groups within your target audience can help to develop a strong reputation as a business that is closely connected with its customers and community.
Happy Customers
The more you know about your customers, the better you can serve their needs and the happier you can make them. Happy buyers experience greater customer satisfaction, leading to more repeat business and positive online reviews. And that’s a great recipe for growing your business and generating more income.
Find the Right Customers for Your Business
Every business wants more customers, but sometimes the concept of the right customer gets overlooked. It is important to attract customers that have a high lifetime value, who are most likely to be satisfied and return for your services.
Although brief, our buyer persona example tells you a lot about Busy Betty. If she were your customer, it would also tell you a lot about who’s using your cleaning services, and what motivated them to make that decision. But if Busy Betty is so happy with your services, why hasn’t everyone in town become a customer?
One possible reason is that they’ve yet to discover your business. Another possibility is that they’re already using a competitor’s cleaning services. The more likely reason is that home cleaning services, no matter how well-priced or reliable, simply aren’t something that everybody wants or needs.
Finding the right customers for your business requires understanding who they are, and what drives their purchasing decisions. Creating specific buyer personas can facilitate this knowledge.
Create an Effective Sales Funnel
Creating a buyer persona is one of the first steps in building a successful sales funnel for your business. Customers need time and space to make a buying decision, so funneling them toward a purchase begins with generating and nurturing awareness about what your business can do for them. The most valuable people to target in your awareness campaigns are the ones who most resemble your current, satisfied customers.
Buyer personas make it possible to effectively market yourself to your customers. It’s difficult, if not impossible, for your business to create engaging content and relevant messaging for an audience you know little about. Figuring out who your customers are and what appeals to them can help you to personalize communications, show you where to go to generate more awareness for your business, and help you to stand out and satisfy customers at every stage of the buying cycle.
