How Buyer Personas Can Save Your Spending

Marketing planning can feel a lot like looking into a crystal ball, but a buyer persona helps clear the fog by providing a depiction of your ideal customer.  This ideal customer is based on data about your current customers and your industry and helps your company manifest and mold future clients. Much like vision boards, buyer personas are derived from customer and market research, focus groups, customer service observation, consumer demographics, and psychographics.  But why do all the research and leg work? A buyer persona identifies how potential customers are making purchasing decisions, what types of products and services they are looking for, and what encourages them to do business with your brand. According to HubSpot, buyer personas are a crucial component of successful inbound marketing, particularly for the sales and marketing departments.

Here are three ways that buyer personas save your spending:

Increased Efficiency in your Marketing

You are likely to spend more time and money on pointless marketing pursuits if you don’t know who you should be selling to.  Every marketing pitch needs to be assessed by your personas. The personas you create for your business should be the guiding force in all your endeavors. They guide the buyer's journey and the overall customer experience.  For example, if you are targeting an older demographic, you would want to spend less time and money on social media than if you are targeting millennials. By distributing in your buying personas preferred channels and communicating in “their” language you are more apt to create long-term relationships and better lead results.

Gives Value to your Product

When you know who you are selling to, you create a selling pitch that has meaning.  Your messaging will be directly focusing on the pains and desires of your buyers. When a customer feels understood they will be willing to purchase a product or buy into your brand.  If you want to sell a product like tennis shoes to senior adults you wouldn’t want to use the words “speed, training, and running” you would want to use words like “comfort, support, and balance”.   Most of the time buyers don’t know exactly what they want, but asking the right questions to that demographic/target audience you will start to see common pains and desires for a product/service.

Analyze and Repeat

Once you have your buyer personas in place, you will be able to match your marketing strategy to their needs and motivations.  It doesn’t just stop there though. While the initial development of buyer personas is time-consuming, personas are meant to be continually refined if they are expected to be effective.  By collecting feedback through surveys, comment cards, focus groups, and interviews you can compare with your existing persona to see if there have been any major shifts in customer’s wants and needs.

A buyer persona is essential to the success and future growth of your brand.  Be sure you develop multiple personas based upon what product benefits you want to emphasize.  Don’t fret if you don’t have buyer personas in place. It’s never too late to start. Need assistance on where to begin gathering the data for creating your buyer personas?  Connect with us today and learn how to create the perfect buyer personas to help save your spending.