You may already know who your "audience" is, but do you have buyer personas? Buyer personas provide insight into a particular audience so that you can focus your marketing efforts.

By understanding the importance of buyer personas and how to create them you can focus your marketing effort and close the deals that are important to your business growth.

What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer (or customers) based on research and data from your existing customers. While your audience is similar, a buyer persona takes that often one-dimensional profile and brings it to life.

A buyer persona doesn't just consist of the type of person, but the journey your consumer will take to buy your product and use your product. It encompasses attitudes, concerns and criteria that drive customers to your business. These personas will give you insights into your business and provide quotes from customers so you can accurately align your business to what they desire.

Why does your business need a buyer persona?

Buyer personas provide insight into your customers and where your business should focus its efforts. The more focused your efforts the more valuable your visitors, leads and customers will be for your business.

You have the ability to personalize and target your marketing to get the right message to the correct audience, tailoring each message to each persona your business serves.

In other words, you may know your target buyers are realtors, but do you know what their specific needs are? What is the typical background of your ideal buyer? In order to serve your customers best, you need to understand what they desire and, therefore, can grow your business.

The more research you gather from your customer base the stronger and more accurate your personas will be. Your business could have as few as one or as many as twenty (LocalVox has three).

How to determine a buyer persona

When creating a buyer persona you should consider customer demographics, behaviour, motivation and goals. Remember the more detail you include, the more accurate the persona.

You can find this information through research, surveys and interviews with your target audience and current customers. Including a mix of existing and potential customers will provide you with what your current customers expect and came to you for -- and what prospective customers are looking for.

Some methods you can use to gather information:

• Uncover patterns about how your customers find and consume your content.
• Create form fields that capture important persona information on your website, such as business size and lead-specific information.
• Discover what generalizations are already being made by your sales team about the different customers you serve.
• Interview customers and prospects to discover what they like about your product or service.

Each of these methods will provide you with more information for your buyer personas.

Having detailed buyer personas will help you refine your marketing and sales strategy and bring you more qualified leads, which take fewer resources to close.

Does your business use buyer personas? Let us know in the comments below.

The post Why Create Buyer Personas? appeared first on LocalVox.

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