What is a Buyer Persona

You've probably heard the term buyer persona if you've been anywhere near the world of digital marketing in the last years. It's tossed out casually, as if everyone has one and everyone knows what it is.

But, that's simply not the case, isn’t it? If you've come to this new article from our blog after a covert search for what is a buyer persona and you're expecting to discover what everybody's talking about, you've come to the right place – Coco Solution.

Definition of Buyer Persona

According to Sam Kusinitz from HubSpot, “a buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. When creating your buyer persona(s), consider including customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. The more detailed you are, the better.”

Kusinitz adds that “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 Important?

The importance of buyer personas cannot be measured, as they contribute ensuring that all activities involved in acquiring and serving the customers are customized to their needs. That may sound simple, but it isn’t.

If you analyze the way companies present themselves, you’ll start to notice that, instead of talking about the customer’s needs, they talk about themselves. This puts them at odds with the way people make decisions.

When picking a service or product, people obviously move toward businesses they know and trust. Of course, the best way to build trust is showing genuine understanding and concern.

Gaining trust as a business requires a subtle, but really important, shift in the way you present yourself to your customers. First of all, show your potential clients that you get them by addressing their need so they can explore what you offer.

Creating buyer personas, and continually using them to guide your business, can help keep you centered on the needs of your clients.

How Are Buyer Personas Used?

The very process of building a buyer persona is illuminating in itself. To create a buyer persona you first need to ask yourself serious questions about your ideal customers. Only then you can compare your answers to discover any inconsistencies in your perspectives and promote discussions to resolve them.

One of the instant benefits of a buyer persona is that it helps you gain clients insights. This will ensure that marketing, sales, product development and customer support all have the same view of your ideal customer. You can then use your buyer personas to guide the direction of your work. For example:

• Customer support teams can use buyer personas to better serve your customers. By being trained on the problems your customers are trying to solve with your product and the frustration it causes when things don’t work out, your support team will be able to show more empathy. A little compassion can go a long way when dealing with an angry customer.
• Buyer personas can also help your sales team build rapport with potential customers. By understanding what the prospect is dealing with and coming prepared to address their concerns, your sales team will be much more effective.
• Marketing can use buyer personas to build effective strategies. When creating content marketing strategies, for instance, buyer personas are critical. They help to focus keyword research efforts and are used as reference when creating copy. They can also help in the identification and prioritization of promotional activities.
• Product development can use buyer personas when building product roadmaps. Buyer personas will help them identify and prioritize changes to your offering based on what your customers need the most.

Conclusion

“Buyer personas are research-based profiles that represent your target audience and can help you adapt key aspects of your sales and support for greater success. Clarifying the types of people who benefit from your solutions and the challenges you help them solve, is critical to your efforts to attract and retain customers”, as Amy Wright from Social Media Today says.