In order to create effective customer relationships and marketing strategies, it is imperative that a company knows its audience. To effectively communicate with your current audience, creating buyer personas is a really great place to start.

Buyer personas are semi-fictional characters that personify or describe, your business’ ideal customer. Buyer personas help a company on many different levels: marketing, sales, products, and services all benefit from understanding who your business is trying to attract. Buyer personas show business things like customer demographics, where their customers spend most of their time online, things they like about your company, and the issues they are facing. Once a company develops a meaningful understanding of their buyer personas, things like content and product development and potential customer follow-ups become much easier.

Although a business can define their buyer personas internally, or simply by examining their customers, buyer personas are most accurate when you get the information from the buyers themselves. This is most often done in one of two ways: (1) Interviews or (2) Examining CRM and Sales Data.

If your company decides to create buyer personas through interviews, you may decide to reach out to your existing customers and find out what they like and dislike about your company, service, or product through a series of interview questions.

For interviews through online surveys and polls, many businesses offer incentives to complete the forms. Many businesses benefit from in-person interviews because most people genuinely enjoy being heard, and therefore will most likely chat without any incentives… Bonus: it gets people through your door.

Interviews don’t just have to be conducted with just your existing customer base, though. Potential clients, referrals, and third-party networks like Craigslist are all excellent options to interview while you create your buyer personas.

If interviews aren’t your thing, or if you’re still digging for some additional information about your customers, check out your customer relationship management (CRM) and sales data. A popular way to utilize this data is by using form fields on your website. When creating your form fields, think in broad questions: things like company size, type, job titles, and the content they buy the most are all helpful.

No matter how you go about collecting customer data, be sure to search for commonalities between consumers. This way, you can begin to use these similarities to create generalized buyer personas.

Once you have these personas in place (we recommend starting off by creating 3-5, then adding more if needed) you have tons of options. Should you redesign your website? Rebrand your company? Revamp your inbound marketing so it’s geared toward your buyer personas? Why don’t you ask your personas? Discuss your ideas with your personas for insight into what will capture your audience’s attention.

Buyer personas are imperative to your company’s strategic decisions. Take time to gather information about your current and potential customer, and dissect what their needs and interests mean for your business.

Ready to take out the guesswork from your business’ marketing, sales, and product development? KM Guru Marketing offers one-on-one consultations to clients in Joplin, MO, and the surrounded area! Are you located too far away for a trip to our office? No worries– the Gurus love to set up virtual consultations in order to meet with our international clients.

Whatever you need, and wherever you’re located, get in touch with us today to begin discussing all of your company’s marketing needs. We are proudly serving as the best marketing agency in Joplin MO, as well as the best marketing agency in Los Gatos CA, and we would love to help you.