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Customers are at the heart of any successful business. Therefore, if you want to survive and prosper in a competitive environment, you should be excellent at meeting your customers needs. However, how would you know who your customers are and what needs they have? Consider creating a buyer persona, which is a useful tool for this purpose. A buyer persona is a detailed generalized description of your target customer, based on thorough research and analysis. The following five steps describe what information about your customers should be included in a buyer persona. If you struggle with identifying some of them, Lehnert et al. (2020) recommend picturing one day in your buyer personas life and thinking of daily experiences a person encounters throughout the day.
Research Your Customers Personal and Professional Demographics
Such demographics as age, gender, socio-economic status, marital status, and geographic location are basic characteristics that are included in the analysis of your target audience. You can also consider researching your customers position at work and career paths because customer needs tend to vary depending on their professional stage. For example, if your firm sells office supplies, you can develop different solutions for support personnel and managers to address the needs of each professional group better.
Understand Customers Values and Emotions
You need to gain an insight into what personal and professional values your target customers possess, as well as what influences their decision-making. At this stage, you should identify your customers important goals, for which your business may offer a useful solution. You can also identify fears that prevent your target customers from buying your products.
Identify Your Customers Motivations and Intentions
Identifying customers desires, priorities, challenges, and ways of dealing with problems helps to better understand their personalities and draw up a more realistic buyer persona. This step is helpful because you need to know why customers may want to use your solutions. Your customers may purchase your products or services for varied reasons, so you may need to create several buyer personas to target these different groups.
Uncover Customers Concerns
While knowing customers goals and challenges is essential for understanding their personalities, it is also necessary to know what prevents them from fulfilling their goals and addressing challenges. Perhaps, there are some internal costs involved, or no effective solution exists to solve the customers problem. Discovering such concerns may offer you valuable insights into how your business can meet the specific needs of your target audience.
Understand Customers Communication and Search Styles
Knowing where a person comes to search for information and communication is useful for two reasons. First, it will allow you to reach your target customers at places where they tend to spend most of their time. For example, if your audience prefers to rely on information they find in professional journals than in social media, there will be little use in extensive social media marketing. Second, understanding your customers communication and search styles will let you identify what sources influence customers opinions about your business. For instance, if you know that your customers tend to search for customer reviews on social media, you will be better prepared to address negative customer feedback.
Key Takeaways
To create a realistic and useful buyer persona, you will need to research information about your customers personal and professional demographics, emotions and values, intentions and motivations, concerns, and communication and search styles. In some cases, you may find it helpful to imagine your target customers day and identify their common daily struggles. Since your customers may not represent a homogenous group, you may need to create more than one buyer persona for each group of your target customers.
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Reference
Lehnert, K., Goupil, S., & Brand, P. (2020). Content and the customer: Inbound ad strategies gain traction. Journal of Business Strategy, ahead-of-print. Web.
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