3 Reasons Your Business Needs Buyer Personas

2015-12-11 04:00:33 | radiantmarketing | small business marketing

As a business owner, it is sometimes difficult to come to terms with the fact that your business will not be the perfect solution for everyone.

But rather than seeing this as a limitation, embrace it as an opportunity. Understanding that your business targets a specific segment of customers will allow you to appeal to this audience in a much stronger, more connected way – developing deeper and longer-lasting relationships.

So, if we were to break this audience down into individuals, how would you define them? How old are they? Do they have children? What is their story? Developing buyer personas will help you answer these questions.

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. They are a compilation of quantitative and qualitative data, demographics, online behavior, motivations and challenges. Information within your buyer personas should include actual customer data, insight from interviews, and educated speculation about their story.

Developing buyer personas for your business will allow you to have a clear understanding of who your audience is. This understanding will enable your team to create messaging that will resonate with your audience and move them through the buyer’s journey to purchase.

Below are the three main tips to develop buyer personas for your business.

Identify pain points and challenges

The key differentiator in developing different personas for your business is their pain points and challenges. If this is the same for all customers, you can create one persona. If it varies, creating multiple personas will allow you to become even more targeted.

Understanding these pain points and challenges allows you to position your product or service as a solution in the most appropriate way. For example, if you run a restaurant that is near a business complex, you may have messaging focused on convenience and short wait times, appealing to the corporate individuals surrounding you, and messaging focused on your wide selection of craft beers and delicious appetizers for the casual diner.

Know where you can find your audience

Different audiences use different platforms and resources and spend their time in different ways. Understanding who your audience is will offer you insight into where they spend their time, where they go for information and what resources they use to help them make decisions. The demographics of users of different social platforms can vary quite a bit as well.

Why does this matter? With this information, you will know where your business needs to be. If it’s developing a social strategy for a specific platform, having an editorial column in a certain publication or advertising on a certain search engine, your probability for success will be much higher.

Understand how they move through the buyer journey (sales cycle)

The buyer’s journey includes three stages – awareness, consideration and decision. As individuals, we all move differently through this process. However, grouping your audience into personas, will help you better understand how this segment of consumers move through these steps and what information you need to provide them at each step.

Before you get started on implementing any marketing tactics, build out your buyer personas to guide you and ensure your time is well spent.