What Is a Buyer Persona? And Why Are They Important?

Who Are You Climbing in Bed With? Introducing Buyer Personas

Growth marketing strategies rely on an intimate understanding of your ideal customer. Like most business owners just getting started, it’s tempting to aim broadly and claim that anyone could use your product.But, this attitude stops you from achieving the best results.If you’re speaking to everyone, then you’re effectively speaking to no one. Refining your message to reach your ideal customer makes them sit up a think "these people are mind-readers”. This brand not only understands my most personal needs and desires, but their product is perfectly designed to solve my biggest, most urgent problems.Hitting this sweet spot certainly isn’t an easy task and requires cultivating a deep, intimate understanding of your ideal customers.

What are Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are a mock-up or avatar of your perfect customer. It covers things like:

• Location
• Age
• Gender
• Income
• Career
• Needs
• Values
• Hobbies (how do they spend their free time? What do they do after work?)
• Biggest challenges
• Beliefs -- why do they believe they have these challenges
• And, much more

For example, your company offers a new digital payment solution, perfect for international payments and spending money abroad. So, your customer avatar might look like this:Women between the ages of 25-30 that live in Europe, but are from another country. As such, they often travel abroad and need to send money home to their families. They’re career-driven so have plenty of income and want to support their parents and extended family.Now that you know the basics about your customer, you can create messaging that speaks directly to them. For example:‘Sending money home to family in America? Our low-transfer rates and quick transactions make it easy to send money abroad’.

Awesome Customer Personas = Increased Revenue

Creating accurate customer personas produce some awesome results. Once you understand your customers, you can:

• Make your marketing spend to go further
• Position your product/service to solve concrete problems for specific audiences
• Create interesting, engaging and best of all, effective marketing campaigns
• Attract ideal customers and build brand loyalty
• Drive conversions and increase revenue
• Boost your return-on-investment

Research from Cintell shows that high-performing companies are 2.3x more likely to conduct background research and develop precise customer avatars. Essentially, taking a deep dive into customer personas allows you to boost every margin from click-through rate to final conversions.

How to Create a Buyer Persona

Many companies start with negative customer personas or, in other words, the customers that for whatever reason seem to clog their sales funnel and never actually buy anything. These companies then approach buyer personas to determine their non-converting customers so they can stop wasting their marketing money targeting this audience.While this is certainly one approach, here at Growth Gorilla, we like to put negatives aside and focus instead on your ideal customer. If you could work with any customer, who would they be?Starting from a positive angle allows us to get directly to the source and accelerate your growth. Throughout this process, we’re constantly collecting data and refining your ideal customer avatar.

Creating a Kick-Ass Customer Avatar

Awesome, you’re ready to get started creating your kick-ass customer avatar. But, where to begin?Let’s get started by identifying your target customer groups. Here at Growth Gorilla, we normally have clients start by listing out all of their target groups to see if any overlap. Or, if they’re all separate, note down all the buyer personas we need to create.When listing out your target groups, think about who currently buys your product? Are you happy with this audience? Perhaps you want to attract a younger demographic or more women, whatever the case make a note.What’s the biggest, most pressing issue for your ideal customer base? Positioning your service as a nice to have is not good enough. You need to figure out how your product solves an urgent need. Why do people need to buy it today?Think about ways your customers may have tried to solve this problem before, why did it not work? How is your product different?Once you identify why your product is important to customers and how it solves their most pressing-problems, thinking about more company-focused needs:

• How much are clients willing to spend on your product/service?
• What customers generate the most income for your company?
• Do you want one-off sales or long-term relationships?

Afterwards, you want to start filling out each buyer persona/avatar including:

• Demographics (age, location, education etc)
• Story/bio - a bit like a pen portrait
• Needs/motivations - what’s their biggest pain points?
• Goals/solutions - how the product/service meets their needs.

You ultimately want to identify your perfect bedmate -- a customer group whose goals align perfectly with your company’s.Typically a perfect bedmate will be someone who’s most pressing problem is quickly solved by your product, like a soothing balm.Only then can you develop brand loyalty. After all, customer’s won’t be able to maintain the same standards without your product/service. You make their lives easier, better, etc.

Using Your Customer Persona

Now you’ve identified your buyer persona, what’s next? How do you start implementing this persona across your marketing campaigns?

• Write it Down. As you discover your ideal customer, make sure to write it down so you can refer back to it. Give each customer segment a fun name, like ‘working moms’ or ‘globe trotters’, to help build deeper connections and make it easier to envision your avatars as real people.
• Growth Marketing Strategy. Whether you already have a marketing strategy or are starting from scratch, you need to intimately integrate your customer persona. Go back and look at previous campaigns, do they talk to your ideal customer? How can you tailor these to be more effective?
• Badass Branding. You also need to look at your current brand and how closely it represents your customer’s preferences. If your website is rather boring, you’re not going to attract hipsters. It may be time for a rebrand.
• Future-Forward Strategy. Once you’ve analysed your past and current approaches, use these insights to fix your strategy and create a roadmap for moving forward. Now that you know who you’re speaking to, it should be rather easy to tailor all future campaigns.
• Collect Data. Speak with your current customers, via email or webchat, to gather information about why they love your brand, why your product is so awesome and why they choose your brand.
• Review, Refine, Refresh. As you start to work with your ideal customers, monitor your progress using Google Analytics, BuzzSumo and Search Console. And, assess whether your high growth strategy is working and if you’re reaching the right customers. As you collect more information about current and target customers, incorporate these insights and adjust your marketing tactics to make sure you’re achieving the best results.

How Personas Make it Easier to Court Customers

Developing a specific, perfectly tuned buyer persona makes it far, far easier to connect and establish relationships with customers. You’ll know what platform they spend the most time on, the messages that resonate with them and how you can shape your marketing strategy accordingly.Effectively turning your faceless brand into a more personal, engaging and approachable company that customers actually desire.

Let’s Get Started

We’re experts at creating customer personas that fast-forwarding company’s growth. Learn more about our growth marketing services and how we can help you take customer relationships to the next level.

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