Buyer Personas also termed customer profiles are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers. They incorporate all the information you need to truly know how to reach a specific type of consumer. In short, they will benefit you to understand your audience. This Buyer Personas will drive how you create your content, the products you create, your sales strategies, and any other function that relates to attracting and accommodating the customers. Buyer persona may benefit an individual to answer the following questions such as –
- What type of content is most feasible to generate a response from a particular type of customer?
- How does your ideal customer adapt to engage in the sales process?
- What type of problems do customers demand to solve, and how does your business will benefit them?
Creating a buyer persona is accessible than it sounds! Here are some of the steps that you need to ensure while creating a meaningful buyer persona for your buyer’s journey such as –
Research your existing contacts database
Begin your information inquiry by analyzing through your existing contacts database to find any trends about how past leads or customers find and consume your content. Are they reading the blog posts on your website? Do they open the emails you send? Are they engaging on social media? Which platforms are most effective? Where your buyers are mostly located geographically? These are some of the questions that you should be asking while looking for trends among your existing customer base. And if you are not using the software that administers these insights, get on the ball and find out one that will!
Interviewing the existing customers
It is a good start with the group you have already enchanted. These are the people that already gulp the Kool-Aid and are looking for a second helping. Their satisfaction with your product or service is a good indicator they will be pleased to provide you more information to enhance a company they already support. You should also provide an opportunity for unhappy customers to share their feedback as well. If you are gathering information from a satisfied client base, you are missing out on a big opportunity to view the full picture of your buyer.
When it comes down to it, customers like being heard, whether it is positive or negative. Providing an interview convenience gives them a chance to tell you about themselves, their challenges, and their opinions of your product or service. By letting customers know you value their feedback and will use it to enhance you may create an opportunity to further build loyalty to your brand.
Market Research
If you have the budget to do so, endow in market research can be a great way to get to know your target customers. A market research firm can benefit you conduct focus groups and send out questionnaires to people in your target audience. Some companies today endeavor market research services specifically focused on creating insightful buyer personas. The Buyer Persona Institute is one example of this. These are also companies that specialize in market research for specific verticals. Spiceworks organize market research within the IT industry, for example.
Gathering and analyzing the market research data can quickly discover the commonalities within your target buying audience. But a successful buyer persona goes deeper than generalities so make sure that you are looking even more closely at the data you get from a market research firm.
Interview the potential customers | Buyer Personas
Future buyers are also assigned as “leads” or “prospects” and can also administer you valuable feedback when given the opportunity. These are the people who have to cooperate with you in some way. Whether they have read a blog post, download some content, signed up for a newsletter, or proposed a chat with a service rep. Even though they have not made a purchase yet. They can benefit you to provide more pieces to complete the puzzle of who your ideal customer is. Do not forget, the buyer persona is the result of analyzing trends from all the data that you have collected!
Additional data gathering sources
If you are a brand new company or just need a larger base to show up information from. You can consider two additional options, although the data won’t be as valuable as the organic info you collect from the leads and customers. It can still assist you to achieve your goal of building out an effective buyer persona for your business such as –
Personal Referrals – Reach out to your network of contacts to find out the interview candidates. Contact co-workers, mentors, friends from school, or even social media contacts and ask them to benefit you find people who would be willing to interview. You won’t get a lot of information this way. But you should receive a good amount of quality assessment from people connected to your circle of contacts.
Social Networks – One of the great tools for finding interview candidates is LinkedIn. You can easily use the search people to analyze candidates based on location, industry, or interest area. Reach out to them with an interview opportunity and see what materializes!
3rd Party Services – Paid platforms such as Bridge and User Testing acquiesce you to run user feedback requests for free. While it is a less accurate option. It will acknowledge some useful insights to add to your growing buyer persona project.
Conclusion
Once you have completed the data gathering process, it is time to take all that assessment and look for the patterns and trends. Your goal is to generate at least one buyer persona from the information you synthesize.
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