A buyer persona is, in a way, "your ideal customer" — the one who will buy your products or services. Defining your buyer personas means identifying the different buyer profiles that may match your offers. It's a method that precisely defines the target to aim for. It's important not to neglect this step to maximize your chances of attracting the right people.
The buyer persona is an integral part of marketing strategies and their success.
The importance of defining your buyer personas
Defining your buyer personas is ensuring the optimization of yourinbound marketing strategy. If you clearly determine the profile of people likely to buy your products, you will be able to target your marketing strategy more precisely. Thanks for your buyer persona, you will learn the behaviors, habits, and interests of your targets.
You will know their preferences and what they don't want. This is a clear advantage for reaching people. You will be able to create content on your channels that matches the different profiles you've identified. Online, tailoring content to your targets will allow you to generate highly relevant traffic, because the people who come will be more likely to be interested in your products or services since they match part your buyer personas.
We can see here that it is important to carry out this step carefully if you want to attract qualified leads and convert them into customers.
How to go about it?
To have a chance of implementing the right buyers personas, you must ask the appropriate questions. To help you, we offer a list of questions to adapt according to your business. They will differ if you work B2B or B2C. This list may include questions about:
- Your persona's age and gender.
- Their socio-professional category.
- What motivates them or holds them back.
- Their home address or region.
- Type of schedule.
- Where Are they looking for information?
- Preferred communication channels.
There are numerous questions to ask depending on your industry and your goals.
Define the personality of your buyers personas
Thanks to the questions, you have defined the profile. Now, what is the personality?
- You can ask yourself questions about their background, passions, and what they do outside professional life.
- What relationship does he maintain have with your company?
- IsIs he a client or a prospect?
- Does he need a service?
- What does he think of your organization?
- Whatis it motivates him to choose you rather than your competitor?
- Y Does it offer unique benefits for each profile that you can highlight to attract such or such a prospect ?
- Why don't they buy your product?
- Y Are there solutions to reduce barriers?
- What prompted them to visit your site?
- Which pages do they view most?
- Which media brought them to you?
Collect buyer persona data
A buyer persona is a model of a customer representative of a group that shares common characteristics. To begin, you should gather information related to your targets. Several options are available to do this:
- You can set up online surveys.
This allows you to gather information from your prospects. Be careful, however, not to make them too lengthy. counterproductive, because unlikely to be completed.
- On social media, you can gather a lot of highly relevant information for your buyers personas.
Don't hesitate to glean this information on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn...
- You can use a panel of customers to whom you will submit a set of questions.
For this, don’t hesitate to offer a gift as an incentive. You can also rely on specialized companies. It’s a perfectly suitable method for gathering information about customers’ or prospects’ motivations and barriers.
- Don't forget to ask your salespeople about it.
They know often know their target very well.
Make good use of them buyers personas
Once collected and analyzed, your data must be used optimally to meet the objectives of the buyer persona. You can then ask yourself the following questions:
- What problems come up most often for your customers or prospects?
- Can we define their goals?
- What are the obstacles to purchase?
- Present a counterargument to the identified barriers.
- Highlight how your products or services can meet the objectives presented.
Demonstrate your understanding of their problems and show that your products or services address them. You should keep a path in mind in the goal of properly using your buyers personas and move your customers and prospects forward in the conversion funnel:
For each buyer persona, note the issue, the end goal and the obstacle topurchase.
9 free tools to help you create your buyers personas
Need to create or update a typical profile of your prospects? There are tools to help you pinpoint the personality, habits, and needs of your future clients. Other applications help format the profiles you’ve created, providing reference documents for developing your offers.
Codeur offers you 9 free and effective tools to gather information about your buyer personas and synthesize it professionally.
SurveyMonkey
To understand your buyer personas, there's nothing like a good old questionnaire! Still effective, this technique lets you precisely identify your prospects' profiles and obtain all the elements needed to create your offers.
You are in control of the questions asked before compiling the information that is useful for your business.
Avoid long, drawn-out questionnaires that may put off your buyer personas. Ideally, they should take no more than 10 minutes to complete.
If you wish, you can write several questionnaires and send them to a portion of your prospects. You'll be sure to receive a wealth of relevant data.
To create, distribute and analyze your surveys, we recommend using SurveyMonkey. The tool is free up to 100 responses and very easy to use.
Advantages:
- Free
- Intuitive and customizable
- Response analysis
Disadvantages:
- Only allows information collection
- Up to 100 responses in the free version
Also read: The 10 best solutions for creating an online questionnaire
UserForge
Very easy to use, the tool UserForge allows you to create your buyer persona profile in a few clicks. You just need to fill in a few fields (first name, age, location, profession, etc.), and a profile is generated. You can then customize it by adding several types of sections: quote, text, or list.
If you collaborate with another person on developing your buyer persona, you can leave comments on the different sections.
Advantages:
- Free
- Intuitive and customizable
- Collaborative
Disadvantages:
- Export not possible
- Limited customization
Social media analytics tools
Has your business been on social media for several months? Then use the analytics tools provided by those platforms (Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, Instagram Analytics…) to learn about the profile of your community.
You will get information about where your followers live, their occupation, their gender, their interests, login times, etc. This helps you establish part of your buyer personas' profile for free.
Advantages:
- Free
- Easy to use
- Accurate data
Disadvantages:
- Only allows information collection
Up Close and Persona
The site Up Close and Persona is aimed at B2B companies that want to deepen their knowledge of their prospects. To do this, the site asks you to fill in 3 forms:
- About your company
- About the issues you address (and the solutions provided)
- About your buyers' profiles
In the end, Up Close & Persona produces a clear, detailed profile of your buyer personas. All that's left is to refer to this document for your future campaigns.
Advantages:
- Free
- Specific questions
Disadvantages:
- Many questions
- Customization impossible
- No export possible
Personapp
The tool Personapp is very easy to use and completely free.
After creating a project, you can create one or more profiles, each corresponding to a typical target persona. Choose a name, then an image, and fill in the various fields that are already provided.
Once your profile is finished you can export it as a PDF, print it, or share it.
You can create as many profiles as you want. The goal is to clearly visualize all the segments that make up your buyer personas.
Advantages:
- Free
- Intuitive
- Quick to use
Disadvantages:
- Cannot add sections
Make My Persona
A very intuitive tool developed by the marketing automation platform HubSpot, Make My Persona asks you seven series of questions designed to develop your buyer persona profile. The more precise your answers, the more detailed a profile the tool can generate.
Once the profile is generated, you have the option to add sections to include additional information.
The objective is to create as many profiles as you have buyer personas, so you can create offers aimed at each of them. If you don’t have the answer to a question, you can move on to the next one.
Advantages:
- Free
- Intuitive
- Profile customization
Xtensio
This collaborative, free tool allows you to create in-depth profiles for your buyer personas.
A layout is already suggested, but it can be fully customized: color, background, number of columns, etc. You can also add various sections such as charts, text areas, images, videos, and more.
Xtensio is the perfect tool for those who want create precise buyer personas since many features are offered.
Advantages:
- Free
- Highly advanced customization
- Collaborative
Disadvantages:
- Creation possible in the free version
UXPressia
Quite similar to the Xtensio tool, UXPressia allows you to customize pre-filled sheets for your buyer personas. It’s possible to add numerous sections and change their placement.
Bonus: this tool can automatically generate a name for your persona based on the provided location and gender. You can even assign them a personality, making your persona feel real.
Advantages:
- Free
- Highly advanced customization
Disadvantages:
- One template in the free version
Marketing Persona Builder
Created by the agency WebpageFX, this persona generator free tool lets you generate a buyer persona sheet in a few clicks.
The tool will certainly satisfy people in a hurry because the profile contains few details and is generated from four demographic pieces of information you must provide: age, gender, location, and occupation.
Advantages:
- Free
- Quick to use
Disadvantages:
- Customization impossible
- Lack of precision
- No export possible
Also read : Create a buyer persona in 4 steps
Our tips
Your goal, don't forget is to increase your conversion rate. The buyers personas will help you with this task by optimizing your sales messaging. To that end, we give you 3 tips to optimize the use of your buyers personas :
- Focus on theinbound marketing... Knowing your targets allows you to produce content that will interest them and bring them to you. Let them create the demand while subtly informing them about your products or services.
- Communicate according to your prospects' consumption habits. If you put in place attractive content, but that distribution isn't done in the right place or through the right channel, you risk not reaching your target. The buyers Personas give you important information about this at that level. Use them.
- Use data on purchasing behaviors to improve conversions. The information collected in the personas are essential to move your customers and prospects through the conversion funnel. How do your customers or prospects buy? How to act in the continuity of a « buyer journey » (The Buyer Journey is the path and thought process of a customer or prospect from the moment where they become aware of a problem and to the moment they take the action of buying a product or service to solve their problem) to improve conversions...
Knowing the profiles that make up your market gives you a clear competitive advantage. The better you understand the problems your prospects face, how they get information, and how they make decisions, the more relevant your offers will be.
Find the best freelancers on Codeur.com to help you determine your buyer personas and implement your marketing strategy.
