Whether you’re looking for a new website, a way to refresh your brand or a different way to market your business, it is essential you know your audience.

Having a clear understanding of your audience will help your business determine where to focus your time, guide product or service development, and ensure everyone in your business understands your key messages and can use them in the right way to attract the right types of people. Knowing your audience means that you will be able to attract the most valuable visitors to your business and convert leads into customers with more confidence and success.

What is a buyer persona?

Before we tell you why having buyer personas is so important for your business, it is key that you understand what they are. A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customers which helps you relate to customers as real humans rather than basic sales transactions.

Created using customer demographics, behaviour patterns, motivations and goals, a detailed buyer persona will help you understand where to focus your time, money and effort so that you get the best return on investment by ensuring your marketing activity is well-aligned to engage your target audience.

Why are buyer personas so important?

Your buyer personas should be critical to the way you market your business. Knowing exactly who you want to target helps drive content creation, product development and sales follow up as well as helping with customer acquisition and retention.

In particular, your personas will show you where your potential customers spend their time, the resources they use and trust, and the pain points which keep them awake at night. Having this information and using it as the foundation to create a marketing strategy for your business is an extremely powerful tool.

Your buyer persona will:

• Give you a clear understanding of your ideal customer
• Inform your marketing and sales strategies
• Develop a clear tone of voice for your brand
• Indicate the kinds of content that appeals to your customers
• Provide guidance on where you can reach your target audience
• Help you grow a funnel of good quality sales leads

With your buyer personas in place, you will be able to create content and marketing messages which appeal to your ideal customers. This means that you can personalise your approach to ensure the right people see the right messages, rather than communicating the same marketing messages to all of your contacts.

The most effective buyer personas are based on research and insights gathered from your customer base through surveys and interviews. To create your buyer personas, take a look through your contacts and see if there are any trends in the type of people who buy from your business. Talk to your sales team and get feedback on the leads they are interacting with the most. You can also interview your customers and prospects to discover what it is that they like about your product or service.

By taking the time to develop buyer personas, you will ensure that any content you produce - whether it’s copy for your website, blog posts, email marketing campaigns or even social media posts - appeals to your ideal customer and helps turn visitors into leads which your sales team can convert into customers.

If you’re looking for a way to get closer to your ideal customers, why not let us help you create a set of buyer personas for your business? Get in touch with our inbound marketing experts today to find out more.