When you write a new piece of content, who do you picture as the reader? When you help your business development rep script a new phone pitch, can you picture the person on the other end of the phone?
If the image in your head is grainy and out of focus, it’s time to develop target buyer personas for your company. Marketers hear this advice often, but how many actually take the time to develop personas? Your customers and target customers are the most important aspect of your business. You must take the time to understand these people – their backgrounds, their interests, their tendencies – and which audiences and potential customers will benefit from your product or service.
Buyer personas, or generalized representations of your ideal customers, help you understand your prospective and existing customers better. Knowing the specifics of your target audience enables you to attract your most-wanted prospects and customers. We’re talking the prospects that will convert at the highest rate, benefit most from your product or service and become the most profitable customers for your business.
You can tailor marketing content and channels, sales pitches, customer service assistance and even product or feature development to the needs, behaviors and concerns of each buyer persona. A tailored, contextualized approach means your efforts will resonate more strongly with target buyers, bringing you better results.
The entire organization benefits, though sales and marketing tend to be the functions that live and breathe by the established buyer personas. These are just five of the many reasons your organization will benefit from developing buyer personas:
- Inform your marketing strategies. You’ll have a clear understanding of your target personas’ preferences and habits, so you can better tailor your content creation, advertising, priority distribution channels and so on.
- Craft effective messaging. Understanding what resonates with your prospects means you can create marketing materials and sales pitches with strong selling points that are more likely to convert prospects.
- Reduce your sales cycle. You can learn how to educate your prospects at the top of the funnel so they’re already primed for a sales conversation, reducing the burden on your sales reps and shortening closing time.
- Make your marketing relevant. Relevance is the key to earning attention from your prospects. Segment and contextualize your interactions through the funnel (and entire customer lifecycle) to each target persona and they’ll be more likely to engage.
- Align product development. Knowing your target personas’ most pressing challenges and understanding what they value most will help you prioritize product development according to the most impactful changes.
Ready to get started? This buyer personas guide will walk you through step-by-step the information you need to gather. You can also download this template to follow for yourself.
