Imagine you sell luxury cars. Your stock consists of only the very finest machines. Your showcase is a wonder of modern architecture and your highly educated and trained sales team comes to work dressed to the nines. But your business is failing – no one is buying your cars. You don’t understand why, since your blogs are beautifully written, your ads are exquisitely designed and you spend lavishly on advertising contracts.
Related Blog: 9 Questions You Need to Ask When Developing Buyer Personas
But what if your blogs are shared on Tumblr+, and your ads feature cartoon characters who suffer comic misadventures while speaking entirely in pig Latin, and you’ve purchased an advertising schedule revolving around human services newsletters, big box store flyers, television placements during “Cops” reruns, and booths at beer festivals? Perhaps you’ve gauged your audience all wrong.
In business, you want to make sure that you are directing your sales and marketing efforts so that they have maximum impact. If there is an “ideal customer,” then you want to make sure you’re getting their attention in the space they already inhabit. You’ll want content that is engaging and useful to this customer. You also want to make sure that your business is speaking their language, and behaving in a manner that is appealing to them.
That’s where creating a buyer persona comes in. A buyer persona is a fictional representation of who your best prospects are, what motivates them, how they think, what and how they buy, and what motivates them to ultimately make a buying decision. A buyer persona can be created partly by examining your current key customer base, and partly through data that exists on your industry.
A buyer persona can help a business to figure out which customers are most likely to utilize their service or product, and which ones couldn’t care less. Creating a buyer persona can also help a company to message in a way that’s considered trustworthy and most appealing to its target audience.
By creating a buyer persona for your company, you will help to generate more leads and, more importantly, achieve greater sales. It will also save you money as execute your marketing strategy, since you’ll stop spending precious resources on campaigns that miss the mark and eliminate outreach to audiences that aren’t interested in you. “Cops” might be an entertaining way to spend half an hour – but you’re not going to move a lot of Lamborghinis by advertising there.
Learn more about inbound marketing and creating a buyer persona for your business during our March 27 workshop, "Attracting Your Ideal Customers through Inbound Marketing."
