Buyer Personas : An Analytical Archetypal to Improve Your Business

Success in IT sales and product development comes from a deep understanding of your customers.Your ability to put yourself into the shoes of your customer, to understand their needs, wants, aspirations, work and home environments—in fact, every aspect of their lives—will drive your success. Being able to think and behave like your customers is the key to being able to communicate with them effectively

Entrepreneurs are often encouraged to build businesses that solve problems that they have themselves. Clearly, it’s much easier to develop a product and design marketing campaigns when you know exactly who the customer is and how they will react to different kinds of marketing, because the customer is you. If you’re marketing to yourself and people just like you, you have a huge advantage because you know exactly how you, and your customers, will react.

But, what if your business is solving a problem that you don’t have? What if the target customer isn’t you? How do you start seeing your business through your customers’ eyes? In marketing and solution sales, we can solve this problem by developing fictional characters that are highly detailed representations of your target customer base. These characters are called personas, and just like in plays and movies they need a full backstory so that you, as a business owner and entrepreneur, can fully understand their goals, motivations, and problems.Buyer personas are examples of the real buyers who influence or make decisions about the products, services or solutions you market. They are a tool that builds confidence in strategies to persuade buyers to choose you rather than a competitor or the status quo. It mainly indicates:

Who buyers are, What they are trying to accomplish, What goals drive their behavior, How they think, How they buy, and Why they make buying decisions. (Now a days, we can include where they buy as well as when buyers decide to buy.)

While buyer personas may include other details, Please find below most overlooked and essential aspect, revealing surprising findings about how, when and why your buyer makes the decisions you want to influence.

1) Priority Initiatives: What causes certain buyers to invest in solutions like yours, and what is different about buyers who are satisfied with the status quo?2) Success Factors: What operational or personal results does your buyer persona expect to achieve by purchasing this solution?3) Perceived Barriers: What concerns cause your buyer to believe that your solution or company is not their best option?4) Buyer’s Journey: This insight reveals details about who and what impacts your buyer as they evaluate their options and select one.5) Decision Criteria: Which aspects of the competing products, services, solutions or company does your buyer perceive as most critical, and what are their expectations for each?

Create a persona for your business: When you will create a persona, it will lead to a better marketing, better lead generation and a better business. I would like to elaborate it as, “it’s a small investment that can pay off big time.” Here are some of the points inline which indicates ‘what’ all the factors which make a good persona:

1) Name2) Professional and personal background3) Demographics such as age, gender, education, ethnicity, family status, etc.4) Goals5) “I need/want” statements6) Concerns7) Past buying behavior8) Environment, including physical, social and technological environment9) A quote that sums up what matters most to them

Steps to be kept in mind:

1) Survey your existing customers2) Research online3) Analyze your data4) Share

Things to be avoided:

1) Don’t base your customer persona on one real customer2) Don’t base your customer persona on stereotypes3) Inconsistencies make your persona unrealistic4) Don’t be generic

Build More Detailed Buyer Personas To Fine-Tune Targeting : IT companies are increasingly relying on highly targeted and personalized messaging to reach prospective buyers. To accomplish this, progressive marketers are developing more detailed buyer personas to gain deeper insight into their target audiences and boost responses from their lead nurturing campaigns.

As IT marketers become more data-driven, they should rely on a mix of marketing automation and their individual interactions with prospects to formulate personas. The goal of buyer personas is to help companies prove buying intent among their top prospects. However, personas can also help companies identify new prospects with the help of predictive analytic. Predictive intelligence can not only help companies identify exactly where their prospects are in the buying journey, but also whether or not these prospects are ready to buy or just beginning their research.I have researched and found that continuous improvement is the “key” for better result from buyer persona also continuous testing must take place in order for buyer personas to stay consistently accurate.

“You have to remember that a single data point isn’t a trend. As with any type of persona document, you’ll want to test it to see if it really sticks and understand that if it doesn’t, it can be a little fluid.”

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