How to Develop Buyer Personas
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Successful communications strategies work because they identify one or more buyer personas to target. You need to make these personas part of your planning process.
Buyer profiles, or personas, will be the cornerstone of your communications strategy. They are a crucial part of your planning process, and, although it’s tempting, you shouldn’t rush through them to get on to the fun stuff.
While you may only have one persona, or you may have several, there are still things you need to know about each group:
- Their goals and aspirations
- Their problems (so you can solve them)
- Where they go to try and solve aforementioned problems
- How you can best reach them
- What is important to them
- What kind of language do they use
- What kind of images appeal to them
- What kind of multimedia do they use
By doing this kind of basic research, you can learn a lot about these groups, and apply those learnings to your communications strategy to make it even more effective.
If you’ve got more than one persona, then you will also have to segment your communications strategy in order to target each persona individually. We’re trying to get away from the one-size-fits-all mentality when it comes to communications; it won’t do you any good to go through the buyer persona process and then try to shoehorn all the personas into one communication strategy.
By doing this basic research, you can learn a lot about these groups, and apply those learnings to your communications strategy to make it even more effective. The best way to learn about these people is to interview them, although that’s not always possible.
Look for other ways to learn about their habits – how did they get to your site, where do they go afterwards. You can also ask for information from current customers when they are completing a purchase, or give away something for free in exchange for some useful (but not personal) information about them.
By using these personas, you have a chance to truly empathize with your target buyers and to understand what they need, instead of concentrating on selling your product. You can see what drives them through the decision process.
Information you should see in your persona profile includes their background, daily activities, and solutions for their problems. The more you know about your market, the easier this will be to do.
Here’s what you need to do:
- Identify the possible buyer personas for your site.
- Fill out as much information as you can about your target groups; make sure to develop them into a real personality (give them a name if that helps) that you can relate to, not just generalization about a group.
Very nice article and really helpful.
Wish to read more on that topic as it is really important to know the techniques.
Thanks
This is the sort of stuff I never spend enough time working on but I’m sure makes all the difference in terms of ROI. Thanks.
Ha, I remember a lot of those secrets while doing sales for a bank that was bought out of BoA.
What they told us is simple, it’s all about the “What’s in it for me”
Persona marketing is an interesting idea, and one well worth the investigating. Jenny Craig is a good example of a business that have really consciously chased the concept.
Not generalizing buyers is a good strategy. However, categorizing them to a number of subgroups is such an arduous task. You could encounter limitations when you try to pull out some info. But I guess it depends to the marketer’s tactic. I may suggest to research for the most appealing and effective communication strategy- it will save time and effort as well.
Being flexible enough to know the persona of each buyer would be a great help.
Great post.
Frank Kern even suggests you come up with a whole personality (like a name, adress, family, kids, occupation, etc.) for your personas
Igor
Ya, Frank talks about creating your perfect customer… it is basically what i am talking about here.
Helpfull post… My hosting project will benefit from. Thank You Jason
I am now looking at my stats and thinking about them differently!
[...] How to Become a Trusted Expert Written by John Cow on August 24th, 2009 To develop thought leadership, you need to start to think like your buyer personas. (See previous post in series How to Develop Buyer Personas) [...]
[...] To develop thought leadership, you need to start to think like your buyer personas. (See previous post in series How to Develop Buyer Personas) [...]
[...] To develop thought leadership, you need to start to think like your buyer personas. (See previous post in series How to Develop Buyer Personas) [...]
[...] To develop thought leadership, you need to start to think like your buyer personas. (See previous post in series How to Develop Buyer Personas) [...]