One of the first rules of marketing is ‘know your customer’. Understand their pain, problem, fear, want, need or desires inside and out so you can deliver the solution with clarity, and you’ll find that your marketing and sales become easier. Understanding those customers is where the buyer personas come in. Defining your audience…
Defining your audience with buyer personas
In answer to the question, yes, I do believe a buyer persona is a valuable tool to knowing who you’re selling to. As the popular adage goes, ‘if you’re selling to everyone, you’re attractive to no one’, meaning no one is identifying with your messaging as it’s just too vague to speak to the potential buyer’s needs.
If you have got buyer personas but haven’t looked at them recently, I encourage you to revisit them next time you work on your business. Perhaps you could include buyer personas in your regular retrospective, as your business (and potentially audience) changes and grows.
What area of my business will a buyer persona improve?
As buyer personas fall into the marketing and sales process, we’d hope that these are the two areas that will see a marked improvement once they have been defined. Here’s where they can impact most positively:
Targeted messaging: helping you stay on topic when crafting marketing or ad copy. Helping you to demonstrate your expertise, experience, authority and trustworthiness.
Product or service development: Watching how the needs of your buyers change as your industry develops is important to ensure you’re still offering relevant products or services to the right people at the right time.
Building trust: By demonstrating that you have the needs of your customers at the heart of your business, they will come to trust that you are focused on helping them. This helps build a positive customer experience – how can you make everyone feel special if you’re trying to talk to everyone at once?
Customer journey: And speaking of customer experience, knowing when your customers need to hear from you, and what they need to hear helps you know what added value to provide and what check-in points you can add to your customer’s buying journey.
I’m sure there are more areas of business that defined buyer personas can improve or make more efficient, and if you think hard enough I bet it’s almost every area!
The point I’m trying to make in this article is this: your business will be better if you understand your customer, and they understand you.
For support with how to create a buyer persona, please see the next blog, or book some time with me for 30 minutes of free business consultation.