Building a solid business brand is not just a promotion and marketing strategy. But also how the business knows the target customer specifically by creating a buyer persona. What exactly is a buyer persona? And why is this term so crucial in today’s business strategy implementation?
Contents
- 1 What are Buyer Personas?
- 2 Information Needed to Create a Buyer/Customer Persona
- 3 How to Create a Buyer Persona for Business
What are Buyer Personas?
A buyer persona represents a typical target business customer obtained from in-depth research. Ideally, you should profile your customers as if they were honest, from the collection of demographic, behavioral, and personality data to how they make decisions when buying products.
This step will undoubtedly be beneficial, especially when you want to convey business value to customers. In addition, other ways of doing business can also run more efficiently. Starting from marketing, content creation, product development, and so on. Thus, business prospects can be much more assured because you can know what the market needs.
Information Needed to Create a Buyer/Customer Persona
Here is some information needed to create a buyer persona (customer persona)
- Personal data – name, gender, education level, age, employment status, total income, status, and age of children
- Behavior – hobbies, favorite foods and drinks, things you like, social media accounts, online forums you follow, and shopping behavior
- Habits when shopping – means of communication (phone, email, or in person), how to get to know a product (advertising, internet, or other people’s suggestions), behavior when buying products online, preferred shopping system (online or offline)
The elements above are only a large part of the data needed to determine the buyer persona. If you have additional features, then it will undoubtedly be better. You can do direct interviews with some of your potential target customers to get more specific information.
How to Create a Buyer Persona for Business
It is necessary to research your customers’ character to be later used as insight in carrying out other business strategies. Here are the steps to create a buyer persona for your business:
1. Doing In-depth Research
Have you listened to the discussion about what information is needed for research? The first step that must be applied is to collect complete information about your market, starting from where you live, age, income, shopping behavior, how to make decisions, and identify what interests and activities you like.
How to get it? Several things can be done. One of them is by utilizing several tools such as Google Analytics and then social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook to other social media analytics tools such as Social reports, Hootsuite, Buffer Analyze, and many others.
Find out various information about whether competitors’ markets have the same target group as you, how they can approach customers, what efforts are being made to compete, and so on.
2. Identifying Customer Problems (Pain Points)
At this stage, try to answer questions like “What is the problem that the potential customer wants to solve? What obstacles did they face in achieving their goals?”
Several ways to answer these questions are by monitoring them directly through the tools mentioned in the previous point. It can also be done with other extensive methods, such as by conducting surveys via email, interviews, and even Focus Group Discussions (FGD) to get specific information.
3. Identification of Customer Goals (Customer Goals)
It is no more vital that you know what problems consumers face; than find out what goals they want to achieve.
It is possible that each customer’s goals may not always be professional or personal. Not everything has to do with the features of your business. However, this still plays an essential role, for at least you can use a more qualified approach when running a marketing strategy.
4. Knowing Your Business Can Help
By creating a buyer persona, you can also use it as an ingredient in developing a product or service for your business. In essence, you can see that many other companies can be offered to meet customer goals beyond the existing products.
5. Categorizing Each Persona
It is time you categorize each Persona that is obtained from each process that has been passed. Bryan Eisenberg, a writer from New York, in his book entitled Buyer Legends – revealed that the buyer persona has four different models, namely:
- Competitive Persona – a buyer persona model with a character who likes competitive things. Consumers with this character tend to look for products or services that can increase their quality more than consumers who don’t use them.
- Spontaneous Persona – a person who is easily influenced and influenced because it involves emotions in making decisions. In other words, this Persona is much easier to persuade to buy when there are colleagues, or people you know have been your customers.
- Methodical Persona – a person with a logical and meticulous character when acting. So to attract attention, make sure that the business offers products that are superior to those of competitors.
- Humanistic Persona – a persona model with a somewhat slow nature in making decisions, so try to impress him when offering your product or service.
After collecting each persona data, try always to position yourself as a consumer when deciding to design a new business strategy. Monitor and evaluate regularly until you have established solid relationships with customers and created a trusted business brand.
6. Creating a Negative Buyer Persona
Every human being has positives and negatives. Likewise, the process of creating a buyer persona in a business. A negative persona is the opposite of a positive one, whereas a negative one will not be your target market. Eliminating people who are not targeted directly makes your buyer persona more specific.
FAQ
Why should we study buyer persona?
-Why Should You Create a Buyer Persona? Creating a buyer persona for your business helps you better understand your customers or potential customers. So, you can ensure that the value contained in the industry can provide benefits.
Why is Persona very important for companies in marketing their products?
-Personas will help them identify and prioritize changes to your offering based on what your customers need most. Marketing teams can use Buyer personas to build effective strategies. For example, personality is essential when creating a content marketing strategy.