Why you need to develop buyer personas

What exactly are buyer personas?

Buyer personas should be seen as a tool to get to the bottom of who your target audience is and link it to their user journey. The idea is that customers should be seen as people and not a series of variables, and when you create your buyer personas, you gather your data, segments, touchpoints and user journey and challenge the way you view them. The marketing trends are all pointing towards less push and more pull; an inbound mindset where marketing is customer-centric. Without a deep understanding of your customers, it’s hard to think inbound marketing and create content that attracts (potential) customers.

A fictional representation of your ideal customers

When you work with buyer personas, you look at your target audience as fictional representations of your ideal customers. An ideal customer is the type of customer your company wants most for Christmas. It’s a different way of thinking about your target audience – as real people, not just demographic variables. This gives you a more nuanced understanding of who your business is communicating with.

Your personas - people with ambition

With the inbound approach, the customer is the focus and the way to make your business interesting is to develop content tailored to your personas. Creating genuine relationships and developing relevant content for someone you don’t know is next to impossible. That’s why you need to do your homework (don’t worry – the syllabus isn’t that big) and work thoroughly with your buyer personas. You should end up understanding their ambitions, goals and challenges – and help them through the content you produce. Buyer personas are relevant for all types of businesses as they are real people that all industries – whether B2C or B2B – communicate with each other in one way or another. The best buyer personas are based on insights. Many of which you probably already have. It’s also okay to make some educated guesses, but be careful not to base too much on what you think you know.

Your buyer personas should be based on, among other things:

The classic variables: demographic, geographic, “psychographic” and behavioral variables
Interviews with a variety of existing and potential customers
Data analysis
Various internal and external studies

The journey where you are the destination

In addition to understanding your ideal customers’ profile, you also need to take a closer look at their user journey. How do they first become aware that they might have a need for your product? How do they start to consider the options to fulfill that need? What alternatives do they have and how do they evaluate them? When they are ready to make a choice, how do they decide? These questions are easier to answer when you’ve gotten to know your persona – and you have when you’ve reached this stage.

Once you know this, you can help them in the process by developing content that gently guides them through the decision-making process of choosing your business. This is the essence of the Inbound Marketing mindset. See the user journey in the model below, which also shows what type of content is best suited for the different stages.

At the same time, think about the different touchpoints: where does your company meet its personas? There are many different platforms – both online and offline – that serve different purposes at different stages of the decision-making process. The content you’ve developed for each stage of the decision-making process needs to be distributed to customers on the right platform.

Create the story of the persona

A great way to map out the customer journey and touchpoints is to write it into a story or coherent text. This forces you to think about more nuanced aspects that your buyer persona goes through and really get to know them. Think about where your persona typically is, what she is doing etc. when she first discovers a need. Is she typically sitting in a café with friends in the afternoon or is she on her way home from work at 6pm on the S-train?

Here are some questions that can help guide you when you start writing:

What happens before a purchase:

How [where, when and from whom] does your persona hear about your business?
Why & how does your persona want to interact with you?

What about during a purchase:

What does your persona experience when he/she interacts with you?
How does the persona experience the channels?

Don’t forget life after purchase:

How does your persona experience the company afterwards?
How does your persona interact with the company afterwards?

Okay, but how do I get started?

We bet you can see the benefits of working with buyer personas at this point – we’re certainly advocates of the tool, which we see as essential as the wrench that puts the ads together. But we also know that you often need someone to keep an eye on the waders when it comes to hanging the shelf. Please contact us if you would like to hear more about buyer personas.