Build and Use Buyer Personas
This article is part of a series about the core services Cheek Marketing & Insights offers. In it, we provide some basic details about the challenges we solve, the techniques we might use, and the general results you can expect. Since every situation is different, please get in touch if this sparks your interest. We’ll discuss your circumstances, and how we can help.
Why You Need Buyer Personas
Buyer personas are dossiers of fictitious buyers of your products. Rather than being a list of facts or data charts about some group of shoppers (e.g. they are 59% female, 41% male), they are meant to provide a relatable, holistic picture of a person. They should be succinct enough that they can be easily understood and shared by multiple team members and departments, to create a shared vision of the customer. But they should also be insightful enough that they suggest actions your team can take to influence these buyers. Depending on your situation, you may only need one buyer persona to represent your whole opportunity, or more than one to show the distinct mindsets and usage of different groups of buyers.
Here are some key ways personas can be applied to further business goals: Buyer personas can serve as the basis for ad targeting. Often, marketers develop messaging specific to one or more personas. Sales can organize their activities with specific personas in mind. Personas can also guide processes like UX development on digital properties, and product marketing strategy. Overall, they provide a north star that reminds companies to whom they are selling. Keeping that in mind is key to successful marketing.
How We Create Personas
They key research tool to create personas is the one-on-one interview. We want to talk to several distinct groups of consumers: people who buy/use your product or service, people who considered it, but rejected it, and people could have been customers, but never considered your solution.
We seek a few key insights:
- What triggered them to buy, or maintain the status quo
- Which results they expected to make the purchase a success
- What barriers they perceived
- Their decision journey
- What specific factors caused them to choose one solution over another
Through a process of tabulating, organizing, validating, and supplementing this info with other research, we arrive at a profile. This will be a set of key descriptors for this buyer, easy to present and share among your team. It will explain findings of the interviews, and any other information we added. It may have some demographics, though we prefer to use behaviors and attitudes instead, when possible. A good persona will suggest multiple ways to reach this person, through messaging, creative, media, and other marketing tactics.
Using Buyer Personas
In addition to giving your firm a strategic tool to base decision-making around, we will work to craft a set of recommendations to improve your marketing. These will be based on the findings of the persona research, as well as your campaign and business goals. We will work with your team and any necessary outside contractors to implement these improvements.
If you would like to discuss how persona, path-to-purchase, or other consumer research could help drive business results, please contact us!
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