A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. Buyer personas provide tremendous structure and insight for your company. –Hubspot
A buyer persona is important intelligence that shapes personalization in a lead generation campaign. Personas will help you determine what traits you want to pursue to help you find prospects that match your typical customer. As a result, you can tailor your content to attract the most valuable visitors, leads, and customers to your business.
Building effective personas takes time, patients and teamwork. It’s important to remember that we are not our typical customers. If we build a lead generation strategy based on what we think, we will fail! Taking the time to create complete profiles will help us in our quest to find qualified leads. We need to understand the goals, attitudes and challenges of our existing customers. Using our understanding, we can promote the solutions that address these obstacles to attract potential new customers.
The Buyer Persona is based on 5 critical insights:
- Priority Initiative— Why is your solution a priority for the buyer?
- Success Factors— Tell marketers what the expected outcome is from using your brand
- Perceived Barriers– Some barriers are actual and some are perceived, but knowing the answer gives the basis for excellent content
- Buying Process– Here we are finding out what resources buyers trust to formulate a buying decision
- Decision Criteria– How buyers evaluate solutions they want to purchase
Having a clear picture of a buyer makes a lead generation program more powerful and effective. Personas help us segment our market into the profiles and then create varied content that reaches each profile through meaningful and relevant correspondence.