No matter what type of business you have (small, medium or large), defining your buyer persona will increase your chances of success. In this article we tell you what it is and we leave you one of the possible ways to delimit it.
Your buyer persona is the customer of your dreams. We will not talk here about the target audience, but about that missing link between your product or service and your success. It is a meticulous description, very personal, which accounts for an intimate and close knowledge of said ideal client.
For this there are various processes that lead you to define a clear, humanized and personalized profile, in which you must take into account, among other aspects, what are the concerns, searches, interests, fears and, above all, the pains of what would be your ideal client.
As Julián Arcila, director of digital strategy at Pymes Go Digital, explains:
"One of the fundamental problems that companies of all sizes have is the false certainty of knowing their buyer persona. As the marketing team has spent some time in the industry, then they have a pre-established idea of ideal customer. It must be understood that these are hypotheses, so it will be necessary to verify these hypotheses through rigorous research."
Without research, all these ideas delivered by the sales or marketing team are unfounded preconceptions.
"That's when we ask ourselves why doesn't marketing work? Well, the message, the communication or the dialogue that we try to establish with our dream clients, does not really resonate or is in the same tune of their problems, needs and pains, "says Julián.
So how do you know what that ideal customer is? For Julián Arcila, although there is no single methodology, it is possible to offer a series of recommendations that can lead us to that goal.
Steps to define your buyer persona
To begin, says our expert, we must make an analysis of the information we already have, or that we believe we have, of our customers; that is, to evaluate those pre-established ideas. This is what is known in marketing as informed or educated beliefs.
Second, it is important that you gather and analyze the information you find about your ideal customer on the internet. A tool that offers valuable information is LinkedIn, which yields mainly data of a labor nature. For example, about the responsibilities, obligations and expectations of certain roles or positions.
With this information you have enough to analyze and build a profile; however, you haven't spoken to any real customers yet. That is, you don't have the full investigation yet.
Therefore, the third stage will be to have a conversation or interview with your customers or prospects. Even potential customers who chose a competitor; you can do it virtually or in person, preferably with an interview where your main objective should be to listen.
What follows is to contrast their answers with the information found in the two previous stages: preconceived ideas and internet activity. For HubSpot, for example, the ideal is to interview at least five people for each buyer persona.
"For example, if out of 20 security chiefs 18 told me that their fundamental challenge is to reduce robberies and criminal incidents in their organization, then statistically I have data that allows me to say for sure: 'I have to create content for the head of security, based on how he can reduce criminal events in his organization'; that's how everything starts to create or make sense."
What is the use of defining my buyer persona?
Don't think we get into so much trouble for pleasure. Establishing your buyer persona in a judicious and detailed way will be very useful and will bring valuable and substantial benefits to your company.
Remember when at the beginning of this article we told you that one of the fundamental pillars of a good marketing strategy is the generation of valuable content?
Well, when you are clear from beginning to end your buyer persona you will have a greater chance of sending the right message to the right person at the right time. The dancing and conversation will begin!
You will know what steps to take, if you like pirouettes or slow dancing, you will be sure in which language to speak, with what style and tone to approach, how to convince and persuade and, finally, conquer.
This is not a one-time exercise. Defining or creating your buyer persona consists of doing this process over and over again, reviewing it from time to time, checking that it is still valid or rethinking when it stops working. Dare to meet the customer of your dreams and conquer him!
* This article is based on a text on the same topic published on the SME blog Go Digital.