You’ve probably encountered buyer personas if you have been in marketing or branding in some capacity. There’s no need to be alarmed if you haven’t. We are here to help.
We also want to emphasize that buyer personas don’t have to be reserved for marketing departments. They can also help you grow your channel sales.
What Is A Buyer Persona?
Buyer personas, in a nutshell, are fictional representations of your ideal customers based on market research and real data. Buyer personas take into account demographics, behavior patterns and goals. They also outline ways to delight and understand your customers.
Buyer personas can be used strategically to increase sales. You may be asking, “How can this happen?” Let’s look at how buyer personas can help you grow your channel sales.
How Buyer Personas Can Help You Grow Sales
Examine Current Customers
To increase your channel sales by using buyer personas, the first step is to take a step back. Look at your customers and try to identify commonalities. You can create buyer personas by conducting research, surveys, interviews, and other methods with prospects and customers. The more information you have about current customers, the better.
Think about a day in the lives of your customers.
- Which social networks do they use most?
- Where can they find information about their industry?
- What are their priorities?
- Which communication method do they prefer – Email or phone?
To find out the characteristics of your customers, you can survey or research them. Segmenting your target audience helps you to pinpoint the right marketing messages and helps you identify the ideal customer.
How To Find Your Ideal Customer
Buyer personas, as mentioned, are based on real data. These include customer demographics, psychographics, online and offline behavior, and educated guesses about the personal histories, interests, and motivations of your audience. In other words, buyer personas can help you to identify your ideal customers.
Your entire network can benefit from buyer personas. Your channel partners will benefit from this valuable information. Indirect sales reps can use buyer personas straight away. Reps can also rely on buyer personas for new segments and new markets.
Your partners will be able to sell your products better if they know their customers and can predict future customers. It’s as simple as that.
Create Personalized Experiences
Organizations can use buyer personas to coordinate their marketing and sales efforts during lead-nurturing and enrichment processes.
Although marketing teams are skilled at producing and delivering the right content, channel sales reps must still deliver the right messages at exactly the right moment. Your sales team can use buyer personas to help determine the right message to send to close a lead or convert them into customers.
Indirect sales reps can also use buyer personas to help them sell for their organization. PRM tools allow reps to tailor content to specific buyer personas, thereby accelerating sales and marketing time-to-value.
In the world of B2B Marketing, there isn’t much that we don’t have to plan. We love to set ourselves up for success. Who wouldn’t?
The spray and pray approach is passé. Automation, data, buyer personas, and data are all available to us today.
How Can Buyer Personas Help Marketers?
Personalities are basically what ensures that all you do for lead generation or customer acquisition is targeted to your buyers’ needs.
Take a look at the messaging your company is using. Do you focus on what you do? Or how do you meet customer needs?
This is where personas step in.
How To Create Marketing Personas
Marketers can create content strategies that are relevant to their customers using buyer personas. This helps build trust and reliability among customers. Buyer personas can also be used by marketers to aid them.
- Use keywords as your focus keyword
- Increase SEO strategies
- Refine copywriting
- Assistance in prioritizing promotional activities and campaigns
Now that you know why marketers need buyer personas, let’s learn how.
1. Analyze prospect and customer data
Profiles of your ideal customer are the result of quantitative research, customer observation and existing customer data.
You need more than just the firmographic data to create ideal customer profiles (ICPs). Mixing technographic and firmographic data is ideal. Also, any intent data you have can be useful. This will give you a comprehensive understanding of your customers and prospects. It is very useful to be able to identify patterns among your segmented customers.
2. Understanding Your Target Market
To flesh out your ICP buyer persona you must first understand your target audience. You could end up with inaccurate portrayals about your customers if you don’t do this. Market targeting allows you to focus your messaging and resources on a market that is more likely to buy from you than the other markets. Understanding your target market in its entirety allows you to narrow down your ideal buyers and buyer personas.
3. Align Sales and Marketing
Marketing success requires collaboration with sales. Consider this: Sales teams are responsible for converting prospects into customers. Therefore, their insight and commentary can be invaluable.
Take sales scripts as an example. You can create sales scripts that target the particular pain points of each persona.
4. Talk to Current Customers
Each person responds to messages and language in a different way. It can be very helpful to ask about the preferences of current customers. For example, do they like a casual conversation as opposed to more professional-sounding language?
Once you’ve figured out what the majority likes or doesn’t, you can play around with different approaches until you find what they love. Your message will be more memorable if it is more personal.
How To Use Buyer Personas To Improve Your Marketing Strategy
Now, it’s time for you to put your buyer personas into your marketing strategy.
1. Segment Your Email Lists
You can create targeted email campaigns that convert more subscribers into customers by creating buyer personas. Email segmentation lets you organize your email lists according to personas, and then send offers specific to each group.
The more targeted your email subject is, the greater the chance that your audience will open it. In fact, personalized subject emails are 50% more likely than others to be opened.
2. Identify Influencers
The popularity of influencer marketing is growing in modern marketing strategies. This is a great way to get the attention of people who know your best customers. Begin by finding influencers who are directly relevant to your buyer personas. Then, contact them to discuss forming a partnership to increase products and share content.
Influential people could also act as customer advocates. TrustRadius’ survey found that 84% of participants would be willing and able to advocate for more customers, with 27% willing to give testimonials.
Demographics And Other Characteristics Of A Person
After you’ve been in marketing for a while, you will start to ask yourself “W” questions subconsciously. These questions should be asked about Buyer Personas.
Who:
- What is the biography of your ideal client?
- What are their responsibilities?
- How committed to the family goals?
What:
- Describe their consumption goal.
- Does it belong to a larger goal?
- Is it a family goal or part of a larger goal?
- What content do they like to consume? Videos? eBooks?
- What social media channels do they use to communicate with their followers?
Where:
- Where are they hanging out?
- Do they belong to any clubs or communities, both online and offline?
Why:
- Why are the goals under “What” important?
- What are the deeper motivations for these goals?
When:
- Are they at the beginning of the buyer’s cycle?
- Are they ready to buy or just beginning to research?
Trust touchpoints:
Determine the most pressing issue consumers are looking for a solution to and their preferred channels and content. To build trust, you can aim to intercept them.
Pain touchpoints:
Identify any objections your buyer personas might have to your brand during their buyer journey. These can be related to your brand content, channels and your brand.
Buyer Motivations That You Might Be Interested In
Priorities: Which are their top priorities? What is their global view of the world? If your product addresses one of their top priorities, they will be your most important buyer persona.
Motivations for success: What tangible and intangible rewards are associated with success? What is the root reason people consume? Here emotions and irrational decisions often take place. This sports car makes me feel wealthy.
Perceived Barriers: What causes a consumer’s mind to be uncertain? They might be unsure if you offer the solution they need. Perhaps it is an insidious matter – maybe the wife won’t let them or vice versa.
The Buying Process: It is important to understand how our customers go about selecting the right solution. It is important to understand how they go about each step of the purchasing process. What are they researching, what do they find, and who is the final decision-maker for the household? As a business, it is possible to provide resources as needed.
Criteria for deciding whether to purchase: Who decides? Does it depend on price, features or convenience? What are the alternatives? What is the most important aspect of decision-making? We need to know not only who bought, but also who chose a competitor.
Managing Your Buyer Personas
Your buyer personas will change as your business evolves, just as the world changes rapidly with the advent of smartphones ten years ago. Your buyer personas won’t be relevant forever.
How Many Buyer Personas Do You Need?
There is no right answer to how many buyer personas your business “needs” since it will vary from one business to the next. You might need 3-5 if you’re a niche brand that is active in a specific market. It could be more if you have many product lines or a large company. First, you should clearly distinguish between your personas.
If a buyer persona is unclear, it can be a sign that you are wasting time. Focus on five buyer personas if they make up 90% of your business. It is worth not creating a persona if you are unable to identify specific buying goals, buying patterns, and behaviors. You should be the same with all of your personas. You need to be objective with your personas if your list becomes overwhelming.
You will need to think about the unique characteristics of potential purchasers and how they might differ from your existing personas if you launch a product in a different market segment than the one you are currently targeting. You can start collecting data from buyers to determine if it merits a new persona.
Negative Buyer Personas
Don’t advertise to people that will not be profitable customers. Your company can reduce the cost per customer by segmenting out those who are not profitable for you.
What are you most likely to get leads for that won’t turn into customers? This person should be created as a negative profile. Make sure that you don’t target them in your marketing. Avoid the platforms that they populate.
Conclusion
Trying to conduct your marketing using Buyer Personas is a bit like trying to navigate without a map. You might end up where you want to be but you are leaving far too much to chance.
Put in the work now and get your marketing and sales working like a laser-guided missile. On target and capable of deadly results.
