If you’re selling products or services and are not creating buyer personas, please start NOW!
In our post about the importance of psychographic targeting, we discussed the difficulties of selling a broom stick to Jon Snow. We calculated the chances of success at roughly 0.02% – you don’t want that. No one wants that.
To avoid a situation like this and more importantly increase your conversion rate, you should know all about your customer. We strongly believe that knowledge and understanding of your customer is absolute key! And that’s where buyer personas and also the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) come in. In this article we’re going to discus buyer personas.
Meet Karen, the soccer mum
Have you heard about “Susan” who is continuously annoying you about her new diet? Or “Karen, the soccer mum”, who always asks to speak to the manager to complain? Or “Chad” the typical white American douchebag suburban kid? We didn’t make these up – they are (famous) memes.
If you are on social media, chances are high that you have come across these memes at least once. Funny or not, there’s one very interesting fact about these memes: stereotyping. Yes, stereotyping (i.e. generalizing) has a rather negative connotation. But stereotyping can be quite useful as well.
To us, buyer personas are pretty much like stereotypes – the helpful kind.
Your buyer persona – create your ideal customer
Your buyer persona is a representation of your “ideal” customer. Apart from your usual demographics (gender, age, income, etc.) you will also include more background information such as personality, goals, frustrations, motivations, hobbies, challenges, preferred communication channel. Heck, the more info you can collect, the more detailed and accurate your fictional perfect customer turns out.
Why create a buyer persona?
With buyer personas in place, it becomes much easier and effective to create content.. It might even help to change your offerings according to preferences of your customers. Buyer personas do not describe a single person or customer. They are representative for a whole group of customers who all fit a similar description. Be aware: much of the information you can only get from your customers firsthand by means of surveys, interviews, casual chats, etc.
Simple example: imagine you are a coffee shop owner. You have been selling to-go coffee in plastic cups. However, after speaking to your customers and creating buyer personas, you found out that most of your loyal customers are environmentally cautious. They would much more prefer a sustainable solution – and also pay a premium.
Sounds like a great opportunity, right? So what are you going to do? Can they bring their own cups (which they could also potentially buy from you)? Are you going to offer bio-degradable cups? Will you include more fair trade products?
Without a buyer persona, you would never have uncovered this about your patrons. Now the opportunities to take your business to another level are right in front of you.
Next, let’s have a look at what creating your first basic buyer persona could look like. You can download the template for your own use at the bottom of this article.
Coffee Collin loves efficiency
With the help of above analysis, all your efforts – be it creating content, other marketing activities or new product and service offerings – you will do it for “Coffee Collin”.
With the information you put together about him, you should think about targeted online promos. You could highlight your highly efficient operations. How about launching special promotions geared towards kick-starting the day? What about pre-orders? Collin would love it and he would make sure to come to your place more often to get his coffee-fix.
Get the point? Suddenly, you should be able to discover plenty of opportunities to reach your “perfect” customer apart from the usual Facebook Ads.
Have you created your buyer personas?
So, how well do you know your customer? Have you started creating your Franks, Alis, Sarahs, and Fionas already? It is a bit of work but the effort will for sure pay off in the long run. If you need help, you can always shout out to us. Download the free template below to get started right away!
