Customers are at the heart of every business. Being helpful to today's empowered buyer begins with getting to know them better. Building a buyer persona for your business is a good place to start.
Your buyer persona helps develop a deeper understanding of your customers. It uncovers their needs, goals, and challenges. It tells you how and when they consume content they consider valuable.
What is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. It integrates data, research, and educated guesses about your current and prospect customers. The buyer persona contains details about your ideal customer's demographic and psychographic information. Understanding your persona's wishes, dreams, and pain points allow you to have a clear picture of their journey towards solving a problem.
A well-developed buyer persona will help you discover the following:
- How your customers think and act when identifying a goal to achieve or challenge to overcome;
- How they decide on which goal or challenge to tackle first;
- The factors influencing their decision-making process;
- What motivates them to take action;
- The criteria by which they assess their available solutions.
After developing your buyer persona, align with the rest of your organization. Allowing your team to gain a better understanding of your persona will improve how they deliver and solve for your customer's needs.
Creating your Buyer Persona
To kick-start the process, look into your contacts. Identify trends in how customers reach you and how they interact with the content you produce. Gain a broader perspective by meeting with your sales and services teams and learn from their interactions with your customers. Also review your website forms for the data you gather from site visitors.
Complete your research by getting input straight from the source. Survey and conduct interviews with prospects and existing customers to verify the information you were able to compile from other sources.
Creating a buyer persona is not a one-time process. Regularly return to your persona and update the information you have compiled. Each new prospect you encounter can add a deeper dimension to your persona. An updated buyer persona gives you the best vantage point to help your customers grow better.