What are customer personas and why your business needs them?

Knowing what your customer wants is completely different from finding what your buyer needs.

Sounds awry, but it’s true.

Customer personas are representational buyer models defined in the form of profile cards. They are created to steer your marketing strategies and are pivotal in studying client behaviour and buying patterns.

Individualized prospect profiling is a turnstile move to keep your marketing more focused. Why is it necessary to create an individualized profile? Because you never market to a crowd. Marketing is as targeted as promotions. And by having an intended profile, there can rarely be a poor message match. Profiling makes marketing, targeting and customer acquisition a lot more economical than it otherwise is.

What does a buyer profile look like?

A typical B2B customer target avatar card is divided into sections and fields. Each section is then segmented into fields for gathering relevant data that match your ideal customer profile. Let’s look at what the sections and fields are.

General data

This is the rudimentary information you assign to your client avatar to make the persona more relatable. The basic fields are:

• Name
• Short Bio
• Stock photo as a profile picture
• Professional Objective

Demographics data

Demographics is another representational data factor that complements the general data. This gives a closer perspective of the persona. For example, this data can help you study who buys more from you – men or women? Youngsters or Middle-aged? College dropouts or Degree holders?

You cannot make infertile people fertile. Target the right person. – Gary Vaynerchuck

By streamlining this data, you will know exactly whom to target the next time to make more sales while you waste lesser efforts marketing to the uninterested audience. The demographics fields are:

• Age
• Gender
• Marital Status
• Ethnicity
• Education
• Income
• Location

Psychographics data

Applying psychographics data to your marketing helps you understand what makes people click to buy or take action. You can study this by testing user behaviour and action on your website. Some of the crucial traits can be learned with this data to market better. They are:

• Attitude
• Aspirations
• Decision-making ability
• Values
• Beliefs

Behavioural:

Do your avatars share their professional goals on social media platforms? What kind of information do they disclose? Look at the example below where a person shares professional goals on social media.

Now, if the person sharing their financial goals on social media platforms happens to fit into your customer personal profile, you will definitely target this person. Right? This is where social listening nurtures your marketing power.

Professional details

In B2B marketing, this section is one of the most crucial data sections. This data classifies the prospects for direct level targeting. This section gives the earmark features to zero in on your target audience. The fields include:

• Job title
• Work profile
• Daily duties in the profession
• Skills required
• Tools and software used

Challenges

When you know the challenges your persona faces, you will know how to get to the latitude to solve their problems by positioning your products/services at the right time. There are two ways to do this. By collecting information on:

• Factors that influence frustrations in your avatar
• Factors that influence gratification in your avatar

You can now serve products based on triggers that influence your client to move towards your business.

Social preferences:

• What mode of communication does your avatar prefer? It could be email, phone, or personal meeting.
• Does your avatar order products online? How dependent is he/she on online consumerism? How often do they order? What types of websites do they prefer to make online purchases? What is their buying process?

Where do you use customer personas?

By knowing who they follow and look up to is also an important criterion. Why? To take the indirect route. Imagine your customer, say a business owner follows Russell Brunson and reads all of his books. Say, your business is an email marketing optimization company. Let’s assume that you are partnering with Russell Brunson to include the email templates along with a ClickFunnel Package. Business owners who follow Russell stand a high chance of buying the email templates from you because:

• You are being recommended by their influencer.
• You are making their job easy by packaging it with a product they use for sure.
• Special discounts work dramatically when two effective products come together. Wins for both parties.
• You are saving them the time taken to look for service providers who give such complementary services.

This is how you can use customer personas to reverse engineer your business strategies.

Get a customer persona card designed to work on the profile as a person. This makes your sales strategy more approachable.

How to gather requirements with the help of customer personas?

According to Salesforce, the top B2B buyer requirements are:

• The quality of service
• Project management and process direction
• Competitive financial model
• Account Management

By keeping this data in hand, your business moves through lesser friction in closing sales. This data gives you an insight into the impact and influence these factors have. Your prospect’s business decisions including investments, purchases, buying capacity, outsourcing ability etc are dependent on their requirements and behaviour.

Why every business should design buyer personas?

We have seen how advantageous it can be to frame a client profile to boost marketing and sales. Designing buyer personas saves resources and reduces acquisition costs. You can only sell your services to people or businesses who need them and refrain from funnelling efforts to people who do not need them. If a prospect does not fit into your customer profile, you can stop marketing to that kind of demographics and reduce customer acquisition costs and focus on customer retention.

What are the best ways to acquire buyer information?

• Networking events are perfect places to gather buyer information. You can match a pool of buyers to study the demographics and carry out behavioural analysis.
• Intelligent surveying is one of the hallmark methods to extract the exact information needed for market research.
• Interviewing your prospects on podcasts or featuring them on Business media like Forbes, Entrepreneur etc is another way to congregate weighty information that boosts your business efforts.

Sterling Marketing Solutions provide you with plug and play network building resources and contact data to expand your network and bring in quality leads. Contact now to get your client avatars.

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