The fear of ignorance is the beginning of success in business. One widely-accepted problem solving technique starts with identifying the problem. As no business can survive without customers, it is a serious challenge for customer service, sales, advertising and marketing to know who their customers are.

Every business, brand, product, service starts out with an ‘arbitrary’ target audience. “As so-so-and-so company, we sell A-B-C. Our target market are men aged 25-45 years, working class who have keen interest in doing this or that. “

So goes the marketing guide many businesses run around with. Now that the consumer behavior has evolved, prospects have incredible research tools accessible even via their mobile phones. Prospects can find out about your product, compare prices with your competition, consider your substitute products or read one or two reviews to justify if they actually should buy at all.

Why then should businesses stick to the cold-calling approach of interrupting strangers with pop-up display ads, intrusive sales pitches via SMS, email marketing when they do not know enough those at the receiving end? This problem of not knowing well enough who you are selling to is not limited to marketing. It is a problem everyone who has interactions with customers in an organization should aim to solve.

For as many who still believe customers buy from them because their product is great, affordable or irreplaceable, market trends and bottom-line will teach them the hard way that customers buy for their own reasons not the sellers’. But those who acknowledge that buying is not logical, it is an emotional decision, what have they done, what are they doing to be able to know these customers well enough to be able to influence their buying decisions?

Imagine a medical doctor who is so used to patients coming to him that by merely looking at them, he could decipher what ailment they suffer and could prescribe correctly what medication they should take. Would you go see such doctor again after the first attempt? Would you be comfortable taking injections, swallowing such prescribed drugs knowing fully well that neither proper diagnosis was done nor any fact-finding test was conducted?

If your sincere answer is NO, why then should you keep pitching prospects without prior knowledge of who they are, how they found your business, what they were looking for when you found them, what problems do they seek to solve daily, what attitude do they have towards what you offer?

Built from the real words of real buyers, a buyer persona tells you what prospective customers are thinking and doing as they weigh their options to address a problem that your company resolves. Much more than a one-dimensional profile of the people you need to influence, or a map of their journey, actionable buyer personas reveal insights about your buyers’ decisions — the specific attitudes, concerns and criteria that drive prospective customers to choose you, your competitor or the status quo.

WHAT IS BUYER PERSONA?

Hubspot describes buyer persona as “a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. When creating your buyer persona(s), consider including customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. The more detailed you are, the better”

Since this gospel is not for traditional or digital marketers only, it will be fair enough to put it the way all stakeholders can relate with. Buyer personas are detailed profiles of whose problems you as a business intend to solve. The inbound way is doing the marketing everybody loves. To borrow a clue from this evolving marketing strategy that aims at converting strangers to promoters of your business by attracting, converting, closing and delighting, every opportunity you have to interact with a customer can only get better when you have at the back of your mind the buyer persona.

That is, as a customer service person, you will easily understand a customer’s perspective, then know how to start a rapport and relate properly with a customer whose profile you are at least familiar with. As a sales guy, creating a relationship with a customer becomes easier when you know typical challenges your prospect faces daily and what primary problem he would like to solve.

As a marketing team, lead generation becomes optimally targeted when you know how best to position your calls-to-action to meet what visitors are looking for. Besides, your lead nurturing messages will be able to hit leads at the point of their needs because lead intelligence has been boosted by a detailed buyer persona. And as an advertising or media sales firm, you know how best to create stories around your offer when you know what stage the audience is in the buyer’s journey.

I KNOW MY TARGET AUDIENCE, WHY CREATE BUYER PERSONAS?

Target audience are a shot in the dark, if I am permitted to put my mind in black and white without painting it. It is buyer persona that states the details of demographic, company, job title, short history, primary problem, secondary problem, typical challenges, concerns, motivations, cliché, and quotes from your ideal prospect, your previous buyer, someone who buys from your competition or a stranger who has apathy towards your business.

Approaching customers whose buyer personas you have read and understood gives you the kind of advantage a guy has when he has already spoken with a lady’s mum or best friend before asking her out. He has her pin code, doesn’t he?
HOW MANY BUYER PERSONAS SHOULD I CREATE?

You could create as many possible, so far they are not lacking in details, thus becoming less effective. Buyer persona helps you create unique experience for a prospect during a sales presentation instead of addressing him as one in a pack of thousand cards.

HOW DO I SOURCE INFORMATION TO CREATE BUYER PERSONAS?

Sources of information for creating buyer persona can be categorized into two: Market Research and Market Reality.

Market Research is the process of collecting data to determine whether a particular product/service will satisfy the needs of your customers. With effective market research, your company can gain invaluable information about your competitors, economic shifts, demographics, the current market trends and the spending traits of your customers.

Interview both customers who love and hate your product. Those customers who are not really feeling your business at the moment could offer you great insight as to how to improve what you currently offer. This insight could help you close some leads who may later be interested in buying but have one or two objections.

Other common Market Research techniques include surveys, focus groups, observation, and field trials. (http://www.allbusiness.com/the-five-basic-methods-of-market-research-1287-1.html). Do not forget to offer customers something for helpful information they provide.

Market Reality involves using lead intelligence software, feedback from sales team, customers’ feedback and suggestions. You could also use Google Analytics to track customers’ online activities. Worthy of note is that Google Analytics only tells you what is happening to your website and when.

You need to also know who is doing what, when they are doing it and especially their pattern of content consumption. Their pattern of content consumption will paint a clearer picture of what they find interesting about your business.

Kissmetrics is a good lead intelligence application you could lay your hands on today. (https://www.kissmetrics.com/about/). When you empower your sales team with far-reaching data about qualified leads, you could be sure your conversion rate will be on the rise.

WHO NEEDS MY BUYER PERSONAS?

Marketers, Sales guys, Product Designers, Content Developers, Customer Service team, PR firms, Advertising Agencies, Media Sales outlets, Research and Development teams.

Everyone within and outside your organization who contributes to conversion should be able to read and interpret your buyer personas. The more reason buyer personas should contain actionable insights such as the conditions that trigger your buyer's need, their perception of a successful outcome, their barriers to choosing you, the capabilities they expect you to deliver, and the steps they take to identify alternative suppliers and choose one.

WHAT WILL BUYER PERSONAS HELP ME ACHIEVE?

It helps you address customers as humans. With buyer personas, you could create a memorable encounter for your prospect, lead or customer at any stage of the buyer’s journey. Your conversation becomes more relevant as you already have a clue of what could be important or irrelevant to your audience. Successful sales people know the effectiveness of how to make a prospect feel like a king by singling him out for attention. Buyer persona saves you from the danger of making a customer see himself as a number.

It helps you choose the right language. Buyer personas will teach you what language, tone or accent could get the customer more inclined or dis-satisfied. At customer service points in some cases, it is not what a representative says or does that really infuriates a customer, it is how it is said or done. Buyer personas would have educated you as a company ambassador at that point of interacting with customer how to show respect and concern for your customer. Retaining customers and making them promoters of your brand is a big deal and could be a cheap victory if well explored.

It helps us know how to address customer's challenges. When you start a relationship with someone prior to sales pitch, you stand a better chance of winning such person’s trust ahead of your presentation. How do you ignite that interest you could nurture into trust, then patronage, without knowing your audience’s concerns? Buyer personas contain those primary and secondary problems a prospect intend to solve. A good knowledge of this will help you identify the problem, get him to confirm you have hit the nail on the head, then you proffer solution from the perspective of your product. It is more difficult to convince some to buy from you when such person cannot envisage how what you offer could help his situation in the long run.

It makes the audience the point of focus. During lead nurturing, buyer personas will guide you on how to create your selling proposition around the prospect. Remember, marketing is no longer the push-push thing where it is one-way communication. As you dialogue your way into a lead’s heart, the lead’s perspectives, concerns and objections are what you hammer on, not how beautiful your product is or how fantastic your brand is at what you offer.

It determines what content type that will be useful for your audience. Yes, content is king. Yes, context is queen. Have you seen many successful kingdoms with only either of the two? Much as you strive to engage your audience throughout the buyer’s journey with intelligent content, the context, format and topic you choose and optimize is very important in determining how relevant your content turns out to be. You sure do not want to spend so much money and time to develop content which your audience cannot connect with. Buyer personas for sure will help you answer the “who?” question during the planning stage of content development.

It helps in creating the right product. One common problem with many a great product is that they are too off-the-shelf. They have been carefully designed, they have been developed by the best brains, and they have been deployed by the most innovative hands around. BUT, users do not find them flexible enough for their situations. As we develop product to solve a particular problem or resolve certain set of challenges, we need buyer personas to guide us as to how users can customize our products.

Since power has shifted to consumers to control what sells, we should know and implement what to do to our offers that will make users comfortable handling them. To make them feel, this product is actually made for me, not for some thousand wannabe’s, buyer persona will be very useful since it details ideal users’ motivations, perspectives and concerns.

It helps you personalize email and other campaigns. Much as your email campaigns may be targeted at many people all at once, buyer personas will help you segment your list and personalize your messages. The same message could be sent to different categories of audience using different titles, from names, presentation tones in order to maximize acceptance across board. Armed with buyer personas, you could decipher what will be accepted to some and what will look vague to others. Buyer personas help you tailor your lead nurturing or customer retention messages to taste.

It makes your lead generation highly targeted. Every business needs new customers. So much is always budgeted towards recruiting strangers. Buyer personas is the ultimate traffic generation guide. It helps you know what media to explore, what social media platform you should scout and keywords to optimize. There is no point creating lead generation campaigns that bring millions of visitors, then hundreds of thousands of enquiries but ten to twenty conversions. Let your buyer personas specify the spectrum of millions of the online community members your message is meant for.

It helps your sales team create rapport that well resonates with leads. Whether a lead has made a buying decision and gets in touch with the sales team or the marketing team hands over sales qualified leads (SQL) to the sales team, closing these qualified leads become easier and more successful with the aid of buyer personas. How? The sales team can quickly borrow a clue from buyer personas and lead intelligence information in order to know how to relate with the leads. It is certain they want to buy at this stage, but how would you get them to sign the cheques? How would you make them buy more and keep coming?

If your business loses a sales qualified lead because your sales team did not handle them well, it is always colossal and painful. It amounts to waste of funds from budget perspective and could mean fruitless labour from the marketing team’s perspective. Either way, it is not good enough for businesses to lose a lead during closing. Get your whole organization working around your buyer personas and you, all, will be alright!

It reduces cost of lead acquisition by focusing your campaign to highly qualified audience. Your cost-per-lead reduces when you let buyer personas narrow down target audience to relevant minority you could attract and effectively nurture to closure instead of crowd of leads that pop in en masse and bounce off in troops. You also spend less on content development aimed at brand awareness, value proposition and customer retention since you have a vivid idea of who will find you and consume your content. Then, you create less optimally targeted content, spend less money and time to achieve better results.

Take your time to plan, develop, deploy detailed actionable buyer personas that are beyond some random Powerpoint bullets plus mere customer profiling.
Your lead generation becomes more targeted, your content strategy costs less, your customer retention rate increases, your bottom-line will be better for it. Buyer personas ensure your input into the purchase funnel is very relevant to your business goals.

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I turn your business worries to engaging stories for your target audience
via Social media, Email marketing and Blogging.
You could call it content-driven digital marketing.

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