What kind of impression do you think would it create if a brand catering to travelers started running a series of blogs about random topics, such as pet care or soda making? This may be an extreme example of marketing gone bad, where there’s a huge mismatch in audience targeting. However, the point is that it’s a grave offense to not be paying attention to the buyer personas of your business.
Without a clear profile of your brand’s end-users, it will be difficult for you to determine what kind of product, service, or approach meets their needs. This lack of understanding may, in turn, affect your ability to acquire or retain customers, simply because you’re not making yourself useful to them.
Define Targets
Furthermore, not taking time to define your buyer personas can create inconsistencies in your business processes or strategies. Imagine if your marketing and sales units passed conflicting information to your customer service department. It would create confusion, which might muddle your company’s perception of how your customers think or behave, and vice versa.
The very definition of a buyer persona—which, according to HubSpot, is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about existing ones—gives you a clear direction on how to go about creating buyer personas.
Effective Targeting Important
During the research process, you can choose one or more of your target customers and establish their persona based on what you already know about them, such as their personal attributes, professional roles, and other factors that may contribute to their buying and decision-making process. Since people have different evaluation criteria, you shouldn’t be surprised if you’ll have not just one but multiple buyer personas in your customer base.
You can then enhance the buyer personas you come up with as you gain additional important information about your target customers. For this, you could tap into internal and external sources of data, as these will enable you to form a more precise and holistic representation of the different types of consumers in your industry.
Data Sources
Some of the data sources that you could leverage include first-hand feedback from your sales and customer service agents as well as from customers themselves. The key is to make good use of all your customer interactions to delve deep into the mindset, priorities, values, and challenges of every buyer persona and use these to inform your business decisions.
This post can help you learn the essentials of building buyer personas in the data-driven world of marketing.
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