Why Does A Buyer Persona Matter for Marketing?

A buyer persona is a profile that represents your ideal customer that’s created using market research and data about your existing customers. They outline important information about your audience, such as the motivating forces to take or restrain actions.

This approach helps you understand how and what they think. Once analyzed, the information helps define messages that will resonate with each customer group throughout the stages of their customer journey and the buying process.

The Importance of Buyer Personas

It’s likely that you have a handful of groups who interact with and purchase your products or services. While you cannot get to know every customer or prospect on an individual level, you can gain a better understanding by analyzing their behaviors as groups.

Each group has its own set of interests, behaviors, and challenges – some overlap and some are very different. Therefore, it’s integral to understand how each group thinks and behaves to identify the messages that will have the biggest impact and where messages can be layered to reach more than one segment at a time.

The resulting personas provide a backdrop of information that can lead to better decision-making and more targeted, effective strategic marketing. Each segment should include the following details:

• Basic demographics
• Goals
• Behaviors (including buying patterns and their decision-making process and influencers who have an impact)
• Pain points and challenges
• Motivations and moments that drive them to take action

The information will help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) in greater depth and possibly offer a new perspective and flow of fresh ideas. This knowledge makes it easier to tailor content, messaging, product development, and services to meet the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of each group.

How to Use Buyer Personas

Once created, you can use them to guide any and all of your marketing efforts. This can help you and your team be more effective and strategic to increase your return on your marketing efforts.

Persona information helps you:

1. Create content that matters. Meaning, content that focuses on each group at a time that makes the most sense and can positively influence decision-making.
2. Optimize ad spends. By creating copy that resonates, placing ads where they can be powerful, and understanding times to increase or decrease spends, your advertising dollars can be stretched further.
3. Speak the same language. By knowing your customers and prospects on a deeper level, you understand what they want to hear and how to speak to them using language that resonates with them.
4. Create better relationships. Customer segments need different information at various points of engagement. By being able to offer that information, you can demonstrate that you understand your customer. In turn, you will create better relationships.
5. Pave a better path to conversion. Removing friction from the path to purchase is the main goal for marketing and messaging. By knowing what types of marketing will be effective and what to say during those interactions, the path to purchase can be smoother and therefore, lead to a better conversion rate.

How to Create Buyer Personas 

To get started, take these initial steps:

1. 1. Review your data. What information do you have about your existing customer and prospects in terms of demographics and behaviors? Are there common questions individuals ask about your business or services? What are prospects searching for when they find you online? If you are short on data, consider conducting market research or internal stakeholder interviews to gain additional insights.
   2. Identify patterns. As you review data, patterns should begin to emerge that can be added to the customer segments. Identify, group, and find the overlaps in that data.
   3. Create personas and prioritize. Create profiles for your customer segments and give each a name to make the persona feel more like a real customer. Add demographic data, goals, motivators, challenges, and any other relevant information you collected. Then decide which personas need the most focus based on their value to your business.
   4. Share the information with your team. Once you have a solid set of personas and accompanying data, share the information with your team so they can understand and get on board with the profiles. If everyone is on the same page, all marketing and sales efforts will be more focused and cohesive and therefore, more effective.

While personas are incredibly important to businesses, many aren’t sure how they can be used, where to get started, or the best ways to collect and analyze the data. If you need help putting this together, please reach out to our team.

BNP Engage is here to help and can create customer persona presentations and present valuable insights to drive your strategy.