It feels like I already know you

A buyer persona helps companies and brands connect with their buyers on an intimate level. I’ll explain how in this issue.

1. What is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is all the information about your buyer that makes them a perfect fit for your product or service. It’s so much more than “suburban moms” or “college-educated marketing professionals.”

In my Intro to Marketing, I mentioned a key responsibility of Marketing is to determine who their buyers are and where to find them. I suggested that the outcome of this process is what we might call a market. But I was slightly off.

A market is quite broad in scope, and may deserve it’s own issue. A buyer persona is a more specific term for what Marketers are crafting when they seek this information.

Buyer personas include frustrations, hopes, status, income…essentially any information that the buyer factors in to their decision criteria.This level of detail helps Marketing to personalize their messaging.

How to create a buyer persona

The best way to understand buyers is to listen to them. Interviews, surveys, and behavioral data are effective channels for producing insights that will help shape a buyer persona.

Try to get inside the buyer’s head. Determine:

• What are they trying to accomplish?

• What’s preventing them from accomplishing their goals?

• How are they currently solving their problem?

• Have they been looking into other solutions?

• What are their responsibilities?

• What tasks do they need to perform?

• What are their requirements?

The answers to these questions will allow Marketing to address buyers’ desires and frustrations before they realize they have them. They will be able to connect with the buyer on an emotional level. And buyers purchase with their emotions.

2. How to use data to identify a buyer persona

If your business makes an effort to listen to customers, and monitor their behavior, then there will be plenty of data to help find your buyer persona. Your go-to-market team will be counting on you to help them make sense of this data.

When it comes to making sense of data, it’s always best to start with a goal. Instead of taking data requests from your marketing team, see how you can use this data to answer the questions above.

Don’t be afraid to talk directly to prospects or customers either. Context can be incredibly helpful for finding valuable insights in data.

If you can’t talk to the buyer, then talk to the people who do talk to them. Sales and Customer Success are incentivized to understand their buyers needs. They often understand buyers better than they know themselves.

These conversations will spark questions that you may have never thought to ask from your data. And these questions will help you provide your go-to-market team with a data-driven profile of your buyer that will help them increase sales.

3. Why every business needs a buyer persona

Many startups have it backwards. They start with a category or a problem that they perceive as important. They build a product to solve that problem. Then they try to market and sell that product.

But this should all probably happen in reverse. First start with the buyer, figure our their problems, then build a solution.

When a business understands the emotions that factor into their buyers’ decisions, not only will they market their products more efficiently, but they will also be able to build solutions that directly address their buyers’ needs.

Informing the product roadmap

Buyer personas don’t just serve Marketing. They also help your business determine what products and services they should offer.

When a business leads with needs, they don’t need to work so hard to sell their offering. All they need to do is make sure their offering is meeting those needs.

I’d love to hear from you. How have you helped your business better understand their buyers?