Have you thought about who your buyer personas are for your business? They can be a very helpful brand strategy tool for your business when you are selling to a variety of different buyers. Think of ‘personas’ as detailed profiles of the types of people who are a part of your target market. They will either look like existing customers or be prospective customers, because sometimes targeting includes the goal of reaching wider or new audiences. 

Buyer personas can help you figure out who the most profitable buyers of your product or service might be and save you from investing in the least important target audiences. They can help you understand whether your values align with theirs, which increases the likelihood of a harmonious relationship. Buyer personas can also lead to better marketing messaging, more effective marketing campaigns and improve your sales overall. 

Read on to discover how you can use buyer personas to personalise your customer marketing and help them understand the value of buying from you. 

First, you’ll need to identify your buyer personas. Ask yourself and the people in your business that sell to your customers:

• Who are the types of people that buy from your company?
• Or who are the types of people using your services? 
• Or the types that you would like to be customers?
• Delve into the analytics of your business; who are the people signed up to your mailing list or sitting in your database? 
• What do the analytics on your website reveal about customers? 

When you’ve discovered more information about your buyers, you should be able to loosely identify characteristics that could build around 3-5 buyer personas. 

Next, you may need to conduct research to figure out who they are. By sending out a short survey (hopefully attaching an inviting incentive) to your database, with questions that have the overall goals of your company in mind, you can then be in a better position to develop your buyer personas. 

To identify which personas to create, it can be helpful to use the concept of cluster analysis. This is where you work out how groups are naturally formed in your database according to the similarity of the audience characteristics. A simpler way of thinking about this might be to ask – what are the strongest defining characteristics of a group, especially if those characteristics are of importance to the purchase decision? For example, a babywear brand might have one persona of ‘first-time mums’ and one persona for ‘other mums’ because their data shows a significant difference in their buying patterns and decision-making.

Each persona will be made up of who, what, why and how:

• Who is this person? What’s their background, demographic and psychographics (values, lifestyle, interests, attitudes, and beliefs)?
• What are their goals and challenges?
• Why would they buy from you? What would their objections be?
• How does what you’re selling to them meet their preferences, goals and overcome their challenges or objections?

You can then document these personas and use them to personalise your clients’ experience; differentiating their experience from other clients and helping them to better understand why they should buy from you. You can use these buyer personas to create wonderful sales and marketing strategies, organise your database, create completely personal marketing for your audience, and even help inform the creation of new products and services. And ultimately, help your target audience understand the value of buying your product or service. 

If you want to discuss your potential buyer personas with a freelance marketing consultant, please get in touch or subscribe to receive our emails to get articles just like this one straight into your inbox.