As the person responsible for marketing, you must address your future customers convincingly and personally. This only works if you know their behavior and purchase decision patterns exactly. The usual target group segmentation according to psychographic and sociodemographic characteristics is no longer sufficient nowadays. You can use Buyer Personas to reach your potential customers as early as possible and pick them up when they don't even feel a need.
Buyer Persona Management will, therefore, become an important instrument in thought leadership marketing. It replaces the classic target group segmentation and relies on a modern, much more comprehensive understanding of the customer. In inbound marketing, Buyer Personas are particularly important: in order to uncover the buying-critical needs and expectations of your potential customers, you need a comprehensive knowledge of the individual ways of obtaining information (Customer Journey).
A Buyer Persona is a fictitious personal description that represents your customers or desired customers. The Buyer Persona concept helps you to target marketing campaigns even more precisely to your potential customers. Buyer Personas show you how different potential customers "tick". You gain an insight into how, when and why potential customers make their purchase decisions. Use these insights throughout your company to respond to customer needs.
A Buyer Persona includes all customers with similar
The careful creation of Buyer Personas is a complex and dynamic process with thorough research and analysis. The creation of a buyer persona includes data such as website analysis, user profiles, public studies, but also personal interviews with your customers and prospects. The results are customer profiles in the form of profiles, which should be valid over a longer period of time and apply company-wide.
With a Buyer Persona profile, you clarify the characteristics of an ideal customer. With several Buyer Personas, you cover the various ideal-typical customer profiles of your target customers.
When researching and creating a Buyer Persona, you determine
The careful creation of Buyer Personas is a challenging process depending on the complexity of the market and business model. In any case, analyze and research the relevant customer touchpoints in addition to the individual buyer personas, both online and offline.
The most important thing when creating your Buyer Persona is to ask the right questions and interview the appropriate representatives of your Buyer Personas. Get in touch with customers and interested parties through interviews, customer days, and know-how groups. In this way, you can create valid customer profiles that are valid over a longer period of time and company-wide.
In order to design your questionnaires effectively and as comprehensively as possible, you can make use of existing assessment dimensions from psychology. Typical decision behaviour, expectations, and explicit or implicit wishes can be collected with the help of validated questions and processed in a structured way. The Kano model is recommended, for example, to evaluate your product characteristics and check whether the quality meets the requirements of your Buyer Persona. This model combines the requirements of a product with possible customer satisfaction. An evaluation in this system quickly makes it clear what sets you apart from your competitors and which characteristics are most valuable in communication.
Limbic Types are another model for segmenting and describing your Buyer Persona. The basic orientation of emotion, cognition, and behavior after stimulation, dominance, or balance allows you to draw conclusions about the optimal way of addressing and dealing with a particular Buyer Persona. In addition to these two, there are countless other possibilities for description, but we consider these to be very helpful in creating a Buyer Persona.
The better you know your target customers and the typical buying decision phase of an individual prospective customer, the better you can align your content marketing strategy with them. Only if you have precisely defined your Buyer Personas are you in a position to create relevant and useful content.
You have identified your "desired candidates", recorded them in Buyer Personas and you have determined the ideal information requirements in each of the three purchase decision phases (Customer Journey).
You have created a good starting point for successful content marketing. Your content strategy is the decisive success factor because you determine precisely which customers you want to reach via which channels with which content offers and core messages. A good content strategy includes not only your online channels (homepage, blog, social media, emails, newsletter) but also the real world (trade fair, promotion, press, print).
Content is the driver of the Internet. It is the basis of Google's existence and also the currency Google uses to measure the authority and reach of your company or website on the Internet. The world has understood this and so all companies worldwide produce more content on all kinds of topics every day than any human being will ever be able to read. One speaks of a Content Tsunami.
If you want to assert yourself as number one in the perception of your buyer personas in this flood of content in the long run, you need two success factors:
Create appealing content that is tailored to your Buyer Personas. But your content will only really become a marketing instrument if you use it purposefully, advertise it, and offer it where your target persons are looking for it. A combined placement on your website, in social media, and in newsletters draws attention to your new offer.
Interested parties will even reward you for good content by providing you with their contact details when registering to download the content. Make sure you use your buyer personas in your content marketing. They will help you to choose the right and effective topics, content formats (e.g. videos, whitepapers), and messages. If the content, format, and placement for a buyer persona match, not only will your traffic increase but so will your conversion and (purchase) deal rates.
It is essential that you coordinate your Buyer Personas with your top management so that these customer target images find their way into your management strategy and leadership culture.
If, for example, your company sells products or services to medium-sized companies, the managing director of such a company could be an important Buyer Persona for you. Or do you sell software? Then perhaps it is the IT manager in a company. Depending on your business model, you may only have one or two Buyer Personas, but it can also be 10 or 20.
If you are still inexperienced with creating Buyer Personas, start with the most important ones and create them the others bit by bit. It is important that the created user profiles meet the needs of the majority of the target persons. Usually, the goal is to reach your most important and attractive potential customers and not every small group. Align your marketing activity and the work of the surrounding departments with Buyer Personas and increase the effectiveness and efficiency of your company.
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