Aspen & Eagle Lighting is a cutting-edge B2C technology company. Even though they’re a well-funded and established company, they’re having trouble scaling their profitability. They’ve tried several methods of marketing – print, radio, even digital ads. However, it seems like no matter where they put their money, they aren’t seeing the return on investment that they believe their service should be bringing in.
What if even a slight shift in Aspen & Eagle’s technique could make a world of difference in their results? While they’ve researched the market well internally, they aren’t focusing on getting their message in front of the right people. Therefore, they aren’t reaching their goals. But wait… who are the right people? Aspen & Eagle need to craft buyer personas. Follow their journey by looking for the lightbulb icons!
We live in a fast-paced world that runs on technology. The reality is, your audience is larger now than its ever been. Thanks to the internet and the way we find information, you now have more ways of reaching that audience. This is great for businesses, however, it poses a big problem. More people means more competition.
The entire world is your audience. But the same is true for your competitors.
Potential clients are being bombarded with ads, offers, and promotions all the time. So, how do you cut through the noise? In order to really capture the attention of those whose needs your organization meets, you have to narrow your focus and speak to them directly. If not, you might end up spending your time or resources speaking to the wrong audience, or worse… speaking to no audience at all.
In order to scale their company, Aspen & Eagle needs to first define exactly who it is they’re doing their research for. While their services might cater to a wide variety of people, they need to create personas based on their ideal customers – allowing them to properly motivate potential customers and get the most out of their marketing efforts.
A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer. Not to be confused with basic demographics or your target audience, personas are semi-fictional characters based on detailed research of your actual customers.
Unlike simple demographic information, buyer personas look deeper at your target audience to uncover the needs and wants of your ideal buyer. Buyer personas are the base of your entire marketing strategy and they’re a necessary component for every organization to have, big or small.
With good personas, your organization will have insights into questions like:
A buyer persona is not your target audience. While you might be able to gain insight from your target audience, this insight will lack the personal touch and detail provided with a buyer persona.
Your target audience provides the basic information that you need to know about the people buying your products or services:
This allows you to create a basic profile of your buyer:
Jane is a 44-year-old Asian-American female. She is a department head at the company she works for. She is married with no children and lives in the suburbs.
While this is a good start to understanding your buyers, it’s limiting. It doesn’t answer the question, “why?” In order to truly understand your buyers, you need to know what it is that motivates your buyers to do business with you.
A buyer persona is also not your dream client. If you’re not careful, it’s easy to start building your personas based on the needs of your organization and not the needs of the buyer.
While it might be more convenient for your business if Jane were the owner of her company (allowing her to have the final word on all of the purchasing decisions), that’s not who she actually is. You need to keep your buyer personas realistic – a true representation of your actual customers.
It is imperative that you avoid using preconceived ideas of who you think your clients are or who you want them to be. Assuming these things will inevitably lead to ineffective personas and misguided efforts to reach the people that matter most.
Buyer personas reflect your best customer relationships – relationships that generate the most revenue, with minimal opposition, over the longest period of time. Think about your best customers. How do they communicate? Are your goals aligned? These are the clients that you are trying to reflect with your personas. They are not your dream clients. They are your best clients, based on real-life customers.
Structuring a business strategy without the use of buyer personas is why many businesses fail. Without them how do you know how to attract leads? The research that you do in order to build your personas will uncover many details about the people that you are trying to engage with. It will guide you in turning strangers of your business into customers and (eventually) promoters of your business.
Buyer personas are not solely used in marketing. Their value can and should be utilized across your entire organization. Sales departments can use them to focus on training and learn how to best sell to qualified leads. Management can use them to better know how to properly allocate resources. It even benefits new hires during onboarding to better help them understand the clients that they will soon be working with.
By orienting your team around your ideal persona you assure that your entire organization is working together to reach the right client.
This provides a seamless transition through every step along their buyer’s journey.
So, where do you begin when developing your buyer personas? While conducting research for your personas might seem relatively simple, it’s incredibly important that it is done properly. It is what makes buyer personas so effective after all. Once the research is complete, the second step is to use the research and properly build a story about your persona. This section details two things:
1) How to properly conduct your buyer persona research
2) How to write and construct your buyer personas
Once complete, you will have a clear understanding of who your ideal buyer is and what types of content will speak to them.
It’s important that Aspen & Eagle understands exactly how to conduct their research for their buyer personas. Biased research will lead to bad personas, which will lead to bad marketing, bad sales and unhappy customers or worse yet: the wrong customers entirely. However, if they can conduct great research and construct their personas properly, they will be well on the way to reaching their goals and growing their business.
In order to create accurate buyer personas, you need as much information about your existing customers as possible.
If you want answers, you must first ask questions. You need to talk to those closest to the customer, and you absolutely have to talk to the customers themselves.
Where’s a better place to start than right where you are? Your customers are interacting with your organization so it’s very important to conduct interviews with those that already have insight into the behaviors of your customers. Your sales, customer service, and marketing teams are all great resources for information about your customers. Consult with them and see what they can offer.
Your sales team is essentially the liaison between the customer and your business. They interact with the clients every day and know how your product or service benefits them. They also see first-hand exactly how those clients engage with it. Your sales team has tremendous insight into what both positively and negatively influences your potential buyers to become actual buyers. The questions, concerns, objections, and hot buttons that motivate a buyers decision are some things your sales team will be incredibly familiar with. This insight is invaluable to your persona development. Use it.
Your customer service team also interacts with clients on a daily basis. They have great insight on what your customer’s fears are and what they say about your company. They also have information on what types of questions your potential customers have about your products/services. Because they are the department that handles complaints, they can provide plenty of information on what pains that your current clients are experiencing, which is a large part of developing your personas.
Your marketing team will most likely be responsible for creating your buyer personas. Like the other departments, your marketing team has quite a bit of insight on the behaviors of your clients. Even though they don’t directly interact with customers, they have knowledge about how your potential clients interact with your business. Their knowledge of how to best reach your audience provides a lot of information that is very valuable to your buyer persona development.
The information that you get in-house will be very valuable to your buyer persona development. Paired with your basic demographic information you’ll be well on your way to creating a detailed picture of who your ideal client is, but it is still just the beginning.
In order to really know your ideal buyer, you have to talk to your ideal buyer.
You’ll probably have a good idea of who your buyer persona is by this point, but you need to test your ideas against your actual customers. It’s important to have diversity in the people you are choosing to interview. Having too many coming from the same background doesn’t allow for you to have a very wide understanding of your personas.
So, who should you interview? Consider someone that:
These people are going to give you tremendous insight into what it’s like to experience your brand and what kind of experiences they’ve had with your competition.
Remember that insights are going to be both positive and negative. This is necessary for building the strongest personas.
Try to find people that have recently made a buying decision, so the experience will be easily remembered. If you don’t, you’ll run the risk of getting biased and inaccurate information.
