As a marketing manager, you must address your future customers in a convincing and personal manner. This only works if you precisely understand their behaviors and purchasing decision patterns. The usual target group segmentations based on psychographic and sociodemographic characteristics are no longer sufficient today.
Buyer persona management thus becomes an important tool in thought leadership marketing. It replaces classical target group segmentation and relies on a modern, much more comprehensive understanding of the customer. In inbound marketing, buyer personas are of particular importance: to uncover the purchasing needs and expectations of your potential customers, you need extensive knowledge of their individual information-gathering paths (customer journey).
You need such customer profiles not only in marketing, but also in sales, service, market research, and product development. By creating buyer personas, marketing assumes a leadership role within the company.
With a buyer persona profile, you illustrate the characteristics of an ideal customer. By creating multiple buyer personas, you cover the various ideal customer profiles of your target customers. In the research and creation of a buyer persona, you determine:
A Buyer Persona is a fictional person based on real facts about your target customer. With the Buyer Persona concept, you will align your marketing actions more precisely in the future, thereby achieving significantly higher communication success.
Creating Buyer Personas carefully can be quite a challenging process, depending on the market's complexity and business model. Analyze and thoroughly research all relevant customer touchpoints, both online and offline.
The most important aspects of creating your Buyer Persona are asking the right questions and interviewing the appropriate representatives of your Buyer Personas. Conduct interviews with customers and prospects. You are creating customer profiles that are valid over a long period and across the entire company.
The better you know your target customers and understand which typical buying decision phase an individual prospect is in, the more precisely you can tailor your content marketing strategy to them. Only by defining your Buyer Personas accurately can you create relevant and useful content.
Aligning marketing, sales, and service with the company's Buyer Personas is a crucial step towards creating a customer-centric organization (Customer Centricity). At Thought Leader Systems, we refer to this approach as Buyer Persona Management.