How To Get Started With Buyer Personas For Your Business

Buyer personas are an important part of the initial process of when you start a company or a product. A question may arise – What if I have a small business. Do I still need one? In most situations, the answer would be a ‘Yes’.

Every business has clients irrespective of its size and nature. Buyer personas help understand those customers better and direct your efforts towards the right target audience.

Let’s get into more details covering the whats, whys, hows and wheres about the buyer personas.

What Are Buyer Personas And Why Are They Important?

Also known as customer persona and persona maps, a buyer persona is a fictional representation of what a typical customer for your business is. The process of persona mapping involves gathering all the relevant info about your customers, identifying the patterns or trends, grouping the common traits, and assigning them to one fictional character who then acts as a representative of your entire target audience. Depending on the need, you can have more than one persona and update them as and when required.

A buyer persona is a helpful asset for your company. Some of the advantages are as listed below:

• Helps you empathize with the customers
• Ensures all your efforts are concerted towards specific and right set of audience
• Helps in keeping all the team members on the right track
• Helps you plan better strategies in all the areas like marketing, sales, after-sales or service/product development.
• Helps in better client conversions or acquisitions – both in quantity and quality

Where Can You Use Them?

Buyer personas have a lot of scope in almost all the critical business functions where customer involvement is prevalent. Here are a few areas:

• Help your marketing team design better strategies
• Help you design targeted ad campaigns
• Help you create better product roadmaps targeted at the right audience
• Help product design and development teams understand your customer better
• Help your sales team pitch your product to your client on areas where it hits them the most & right.
• Help the customer support team deliver their services as per your client’s personality

How To Create Them For Your Business?

Buyer personas at first might appear to be a simple task but a lot of thoughts and efforts go behind the scenes for creating them. It involves a tremendous amount of research and brainstorming, but the output is multi-times worth the energy and resources you put in. Following are a few steps to consider while working on the personas:

Empathy: Being empathetic is the first thing you would want to practice while building this amazing tool. It means walking in your customers’ shoes to understand their needs and challenges. It would help you deliver products and services that resonate with them.

List of questions: Do some brainstorming and have a list of relevant questions ready before you deep dive into the research part. These are the questions that would help you define the personality of your ideal customer. You may always add or remove questions from this list as you move further in the process. A few standard questions could be as listed below:

• Demographics:
  • Name
  • Age
  • Educational qualification
  • Job level or title
  • Decision role
  • Location
• Size of the company
• Revenue (an approximate range)
• Their goals
• Biggest challenges they face
• How and where can we help?
• Their industry and associated challenges
• Factors they evaluate before closing the deal
• How do they measure success?
• Where do they seek information? (online, newspaper, friends, family, industry experts or any other)
• Any forums or communities they follow?
• Which associations or groups they are part of? (online and offline both)
• How do they search their vendors?
• How do they prefer to interact with their vendors? (phone, emails or face to face)

Research: Now is the time to find answers to all those questions you listed down. There are various ways of doing that as given below:

• Conduct brainstorming sessions with the people who are interacting with the clients or prospects regularly. They could be anyone from your sales, product development, designing teams. These people can give you the most reliable and accurate information about your clients.
• Gather intelligence about your competitors. You may study their websites, social media channels and any sales or marketing collateral to get this info. The content they are publishing can give you a great understanding of your target customers
• Study existing customers or prospects. Gather information from the online platforms or forums they use, keep an eye out for the kind of questions they pose online, take a thorough look into their websites and social media channels. You can also conduct interviews with your existing clients & prospects or send out surveys to get all the answers.
• Study market survey reports available on the Internet – Some are paid, and some are free to use or can be purchased for a nominal price.

Create a persona – Now that you have all the required information, it is time to collate all that intelligence under relevant sections. Two important things here are to:

• Humanize your personas by giving them a name and a photo as it makes them more relatable.
• Try to make them more specific as it would help you create focused and concerted business strategies.

There is a great tool by HubSpot that lets you create effective buyer personas. It is quick, simple, and free to use.

Share: Share a copy with all the teams for their better understanding of the customers. It would enable them to deliver value to your clients.

We at Jeavio have been working with a lot of start-ups as their technology and strategy partners. We have been helping them build powerful products and their strategy roadmaps. For more details visit our website www.jeavio.com If you are also looking for a strategic partner, contact us at sales@jeavio.com

Kriti Chadha