Your ability to reach more qualified buyers and sell more products depends on your ability to find the right qualified buyers to focus your marketing efforts on. This begins with creating an ideal buyer persona for your business.
An ideal persona will be a person that you can envision buying your products. Every buyer person will have a personality and key characteristics that will enable you to understand their needs better and do business with them.
When you’re making use of buyer personas in your marketing strategy, you can get invaluable insights that can be used to further refine your personas and supercharge your sales.
What is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a research-based semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. It is a description of the kind of customer who will find your product valuable and is more likely to buy from you.
As a B2B business, it is more important to fix your buyer personas to find more qualified leads and increase your sales. Almost all B2B sellers have a target market they want to sell to. This market includes customers with specific goals and needs. By understanding the specifics of your target customers, you can create a strong buyer persona that will aid in your marketing efforts.
Why Should You Create a Buyer Persona?
You should create a buyer persona for several reasons. We have compiled a list of 4 reasons why you should create a buyer persona.
Reason #1 Better Understanding of Customers
A buyer persona will allow you to have a better understanding of your customers. This will give you the information you need to know about them as a person. This includes their age, gender, marital status, children, location, education level, preferred social networks, role and position in the company, career goals, challenges and pain points, obstacles in making buying decisions, considerations, and more.
By understanding your customers, you can effectively market your products to them while solving their problems and removing any obstacles.
Reason #2 Eliminating Negative Personas
When you’re creating your ideal buyer persona, you can also create negative personas you should not be targeting in your marketing efforts.
This may be because selling to these customers is not a financially good decision and/or that you have to spend a lot of resources only to get below-average returns with them. Identifying negative personas as you build your buyer persona will let you focus better on your target customers and hence maximize your marketing results.
Reason #3 Allows Internal Team to Understand Customers Better
The buyer persona you create will be invaluable to your internal team when they are working with customers. For example, your sales team can use this information to identify with and target qualified customers for better conversions. They will have a good understanding of the ideal buyer and can also help refine your buyer persona as they work with more and more customers.
Similarly, for your customer support team, the buyer persona will give them a good idea of the kind of customers they will be dealing with in regards to complaints and queries. Your internal team will benefit a lot from knowing the kind of customers they will be working with.
Reason #4 Influencing Decisions When Creating New Products and Services
Understanding your buyers will influence your decisions when you’re creating new products and services. You will take into consideration the needs and goals of your buyers when making decisions. This will result in highly refined decisions that will benefit you and your customers.
How Should You Create a Buyer Persona?
Before we understand how to create a buyer persona, let us take a look at a sample buyer persona to understand an ideal buyer.
- Name: Founder Jessica
- Gender: Female
- Age: 33
- Location: United States
- Marital Status: Married
- General Overview: Has 2 kids and loves to play with them when she is free. Enjoys connecting with family and friends on Facebook and Instagram. Uses LinkedIn for professional connections and business activities and Twitter for discussions and sharing thoughts.
- Role: Founder and CEO of a small-sized fashion label
- Goals: Wants to reduce the initial costs of her fashion label by finding suppliers that can provide quality textiles at competitive prices
- Challenges: Not good margins by buying textiles from local suppliers. Looking for international suppliers. However, is worried about quality and assurance in shipping.
- Buying Decision Influence: Ready to buy from international suppliers if she gets assurance on quality and shipping.
Now that you know how a sample buyer persona looks like, you need the information to create your own buyer persona.
You can get this information from your internal team, your customers, and market research.
Let’s see how this is possible.
- Internal Team
If you’re already in business and are selling products/services to buyers, you will have collected data regarding your customers, spread across different teams in your company. You will have to ask your internal team to share the information regarding the customers to get a good understanding of your ideal customers.
The sales team, customer support team, and marketing team will have data when put together will be very useful in understanding your target customers. For example, the sales team can share with you the kind of customers that tend to convert well. Meanwhile, the customer support team can share with you the common complaints and queries they receive from customers. The marketing team can tell you which platforms are most favorable to find your target customers.
- Your Customers
Your existing and past customers are valuable resources. You can survey them using tools like Survey Monkey and Google Forms to know more about them, how they found your business, the challenges they faced, their motivations to buy, and what they consider could be done better to make the buying process smoother in the future.
- Market Research
You can get invaluable data about your customers with market research using Google Analytics, CRM Software, Social Media, and more.
You should always cross-reference the data you’ve received from your internal team and your customers with the data from market research to remove any inconsistencies. This will refine your buyer persona and help you create the best buyer persona possible for targeting.
Google Analytics has a lot of data about customers visiting your website. You can get information like where they came from, how they found you, which pages on your website they visit the most, and other useful information.
CRM software like Salesforce will provide you with information that tells a lot about your customers. You can get vital information from your CRM analytics that covers every aspect of the buyer’s journey.
Social media platforms are highly preferred to gather useful information on your customers. Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics are tools that can tell how people interact with your product. LinkedIn is very useful to get information on existing and new customers. A lot of professionals love sharing their roles, insights about the industry, successes, and challenges in their role on LinkedIn. You can even get to know the structure of companies by following the key decision-makers in the companies.
Once you’ve created a buyer persona, you will find it incredibly easy to channel your marketing activities to target highly qualified buyers. You may also find out that you need more than one buyer persona for your business. You can go ahead and create new buyer personas to efficiently target your customers. Remember, creating a buyer persona allows you to be more efficient in your marketing efforts to increase your sales and improve your growth.
At Strade, we have verified wholesale buyers from over 100 countries looking for the best products. You can register for a seller account on Strade and take advantage of the various benefits offered by the platform including integrated shipping, safe online payments, and payments deposited in your currency. We also have an analytics tool that lets you know more about your buyers to help you in creating buyer personas.
