What are Buyer Personas?

In many ways, buyer personas are derivative of your target audience. Rather than consisting of numbers, they take your audience research and present it in the form of a hypothetical, ideal customer. Here’s how one marketing platform defines the concept:

“A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. [It is built on] customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals.”

Think of your buyer persona as the personification of your target audience. Rather than simply trying to target your marketing for females, 25-34 years old, with an income between $50,000 and $70,000, you’re looking to target Liz, a 29 year-old accountant. And as it turns out, personifying your audience research comes with a number of considerable benefits.

3 Benefits of Buyer Personas for Your Business

• Buyer Personas Help You Understand Your Audience Needs – Putting a face to your target audience helps you better understand the situation in which your audience needs your product or service. If your goal is to create and communicate actual value, consider that 82% of companies using personas have improved their value proposition as a result.
• Buyer Personas Help You Create More Personalized Content – Naturally, a better understanding of your audience helps you create content more personalized to their needs. Considering the significant advantages of marketing personalization, buyer personas can play a crucial role in helping you cut through the clutter and increase the effectiveness of your messaging.
• Buyer Personas Increase Your Lead Generation Effectiveness – Research shows that B2B marketers who use buyer personas are 4 times more likely to exceed their lead generation goals. One case study saw a 97% increase in total leads, and 126% increase in qualified leads simply by utilizing the concept. In short, personas can (and should) play a vital role for any company looking to optimize their lead generation.

Of course, these are just a few of the many benefits that embracing buyer personas can bring for your business. Your marketing, sales, and even product development efforts can all benefit from the concept. The only thing you need to do is understand how to build your own.

How to Get Started in Building Your Buyer Personas

Generally speaking, your business should build (or model) more than one persona. Even if your target audience is relatively homogeneous, some variations typically do exist and are important to account for. Most businesses focus on 3 to 4 individual personas to cover about 90% of their existing customers and leads.

The first key to success, of course, is comprehensive audience research. Put simply, you need to have a comprehensive quantitative understanding of your target audience. But qualitative aspects are important as well; try to use focus groups, surveys, and interviews to gauge your audience’s deeper-lying needs and wants.

Use our Free Persona Template to create buyer personas for your own business. Ultimately, you’ll want your efforts to result in a single sheet for each persona that sums up both their demographics and their desires.

Creating buyer personas is a complex process. But as outlined above, the benefits for your business can be significant. For help in optimizing your marketing and sales strategy through the use of personas, contact us.