Information in this blog was obtained from Hubspot Blog.
In today's marketing activities, it is no longer enough to unilaterally "recommend" a product or service to the customer to convince the customer, that is, push marketing, just put the product or service in front of the customer, rather than attract them. This is simply not enough. The best way is to attract customers, that is, pull marketing. Therefore, the buyer persona is becoming more and more important in today's marketing activities.
What is a Buyer Persona?
According to Hubspot, a buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. The buyer persona should be created according to customer behavior pattern, behavior motivation, population, geography and other factors. The more buyer persona you create, the better, and it should be detailed and specific.
Buyer personas provide tremendous structure and insight for your company. A detailed buyer persona will help you determine where to focus your time, guide product development, and allow for alignment across the organization. As a result, you will be able to attract the most valuable visitors, leads, and customers to your business.
Why are Buyer Personas so Important to Your Business?
Creating buyer personas can help enterprises more accurately understand customer needs, customer motivations, and combine customer needs with products or services, which will help product development and better implementation of STP. (segment, target, position).
According to Hubspot, the strongest buyer personas are based on market research and insights you gather from your actual customer base (through surveys, interviews, etc.).
Segment your audience based on demographic, geographic, psychological and other factors found in the survey. Niche the market according to the buyer role, narrow the audience target, and finally position the product or brand according to the customer needs.
How to Create a Buyer Persona
When we get to know the buyer persona, we're going to try to create it. How to create a buyer persona? According to Hubspot and Hubspot, we are going to figure it out.
1. Fill in your persona's basic demographic information/conduct research
It's a question of demographics. The company can count the population by quantitative analysis or survey statistics, such as telephone, face-to-face surveys, etc. Only by understanding the basic situation of the customer, can you create the buyer persona more accurately. Inquiry is the basis for constructing the buyer's role. Conduct market research and thorough research on your current customers to determine your ideal customer, your true audience. The more comprehensive your analytics are, the more types of buyer roles you have, and the more your product positioning fits your customers' pain points.
According to Hubspot, when doing customer research, there are some questions that can help you complete the buyer persona creation process:
What is their profession?
What does a typical day in their life look like?
Where do they go for information?
How do they prefer to obtain goods and services?
What is important to them when choosing a vendor?
What do they value most?
What are their goals?
2. Share what you've learned about your persona's motivations
This is about analyzing the information gained during the interview. What do your customers care about most? What do your customers want to be or want most? Analyze your character's motivations, i.e. what she or he wants. This is where you'll distill the information you learned from asking "why" during those interviews. What keeps your persona up at night? Who do they want to be? Most importantly, tie that all together by telling people how your company can help them.
3. Help your sales team prepare for conversations with your persona/dive into your customer’s interests, goals and objectives, and pain points
Combined with the answers obtained in the interview, consider what the buyer persona can accept and what it is against in order to prepare to communicate with potential customers. After the customer research, sorted out not only neat data, but also in-depth understanding of the customer. Humanize the data, organize the buyer personas into a real person, a real customer, is humanized. The more humanized the buyer persona is, the better it can understand the real thoughts of customers, so as to guide the adjustment of marketing strategies and repositioning of products.
4. Craft messaging for your persona/map the persona to your product
Combine the above information to design information for the buyer persona. In other words, develop your buyer persona solution and design a specific plan to show the specific information of the buyer persona in all aspects. That is, personas embodied in your product or service.
How to Find Interviewees for Researching Buyer Personas
How to find interviewees? According to Hubspot:
1. Use your current customers
The existing customer base is the easiest way to find respondents. Chances are many of your customers will be people who have bought your product before. You need to interview customers who like your product and customers who don't like your product, and that will give you more, different patterns or opinions. In most cases, when interviewing existing clients, there is no need to use gift cards or any kind of reward system. When interviewing existing customers, they may become more loyal to the company or product as a result of your interview.
2. Use your prospects
You already have some data about your prospects, so prospects are a good choice.
3. Use your referrals
You'll probably also need to rely on some referrals to talk to people who may fit into your target personas, particularly if you're heading into new markets or don't have any leads or customers yet. Use your network (coworkers, existing customers, social media contacts, etc.) to find people you'd like to interview and be introduced to. It may be tough to get a large volume of people this way, but you'll likely get some very high-quality interviews out of it. If you don't know where to start, try searching on LinkedIn for people who may fit into your target personas and see which results have any connections in common with you. Then, reach out to your common connections for introductions.
4. Use third-party networks
For interviewees who are completely removed from your company, there are a few third-party networks you can recruit from. Craigslist allows you to post ads for people interested in any job, and UserTesting.com allows you to run remote user testing (with some follow-up questions).
What to Include in a Buyer Persona
According to Hubspot, some elements to include in the buyer persona include:
Descriptive name
Provide a name for your character, either a real name or a nickname.
Occupation
Identify the occupation of the client you are targeting. This helps to create the buyer persona.
Demographics
The basic information. Age, sex, income, education, etc.
Interests
Identify the client's interests, such as what social media software do they like to use and what type of bloggers they like.
Goals and objectives
Define your customer's business goals (b2b) or what your customer wants to achieve when they use the product (b2c).
Pain points
How your product meets the needs of your customers. Identify customer pain points, that is, customer demand points.
The above steps are helpful for the company to establish a complete and helpful buyer persona.
Tips for Recruiting Interviewees
As you reach out to potential buyer persona interviewees, here are a few ideas to improve your response rates, according to Hubspot.
1. Use incentives
Using incentives involves giving benefits to your customers. For example, use gift cards or shopping cards in face-to-face interviews to get your client interested so you can continue the interview.
2. Be clear that this isn't a sales call
Use the phone interview to convince your non-customers that this is not a sales call. Empathize with your customers or prospects by asking them about their lives, jobs, etc.
3. Make it easy to say yes
Take care of everything for your potential interviewee. Suggest times but be flexible. Allow them to pick a time right off the bat and send a calendar invitation with a reminder to block off their time.
4. Decide how many people you need to interview
It's not enough to do one interview, you need to do multiple interviews with your prospects until you know them well enough. Once you start expecting and predicting what your interviewee will say, that means you've interviewed enough people to find and internalize these patterns.
Follow The SMMU to learn more about buyer personas!
References
Kusinitz, S. (2022). The Definition of a Buyer Persona. Retrieved from https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/buyer-persona-definition-under-100-sr
Deng, O. (2023). What is a Persona?: Everything You Need to Know. Retrieved from https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/what-is-persona
Vaughan, P. (2022). How to Create Detailed Buyer Personas for Your Business. Retrieved from https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/buyer-persona-research
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