A buyer persona is a vital tool in B2B and B2C lead generation. It is essential to create a buyer persona for the demographic that you intend to target. Understanding the needs of your target, what it is that your prospect is seeking, and how they want to be reached are all important aspects of the marketing process.
What Is The Definition of a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a composite of a group of people who have similar needs and interests – a semi-fictional character modeled after prospective consumers and aims to provide insights into their needs, behaviors, and buying habits.
Buyer personas are derived from existing customers and market research to determine a hypothetical model that accurately portrays the ideal customer.
Not only that, but a buyer persona also helps identify the stage of the buyer’s journey and helps marketers know how to use different channels to reach the potential buyer. Buyer personas make it possible for the marketers to know where to focus their efforts. They help them to understand their customer base better.
A well-crafted buyer persona uses information such as target demographic, customers’ prior purchases, buying motivation, and similar attributes. Buyer personas help to attract only the most relevant leads and customers to your business.
We understand that buyer persona can be a complex subject, and a lot of business owners either tend to get it entirely wrong or downplay how important it is. Some even argue that having an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is enough, but they are not the same.
And this is precisely why we are writing this article – to help business owners and marketers such as you, get a better hold of the concept of a buyer persona so that you can leverage this power tool to grow your business.
But before we get into the meat of the article, let’s first see how buyer personas differ from Ideal Customer Profile.
Buyer Persona vs. Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Buyer Persona is a term that was coined by Brian Solis in his book, X-Commerce. Ideal Customer Profile is a term that was coined by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.
Business owners often tend to use a buyer persona and Ideal Customer Profile interchangeably. The misconception that they are the same stems from a few overlapping elements the two concepts share with one another. Both attempt to identify your target market, and both try to depict your ideal customer.
The primary difference between a buyer persona and an ideal customer profile is that a buyer persona is created by your marketing team, while an ideal customer profile is created by a sales team. An Ideal Customer Profile is a detailed description of a specific type of customer. It includes information from a variety of sources.
Where the concepts of buyer persona and Ideal Customer Profile differ from one another is in their function and their purpose.
- ICP tries to find which companies and which job titles to target. A buyer persona goes further. It attempts to find out how to target them for maximum lead generation.
- ICP identifies the companies and important decision-makers in these companies to target, but a buyer persona attempts to identify the psychology of the decision-makers.
- ICP is used at the top of the sales funnel as a filter for lead generation, whereas buyer personas are consistently used throughout.
- ICP offers a micro-view of an ideal customer, whereas buyer personas adopt an all-encompassing macro-approach. ICP often functions as a starting point for buyer persona creation for effective lead generation.
This should clarify the doubts you may have about the importance of having buyer personas. But how to go about developing a buyer persona?
Fortunately, creating a basic buyer persona is quite simple, and anyone can do it with a little time and some dedication.
How to Create a Buyer Persona?
To create a good buyer persona, you should start with questions that will help you gain insights.
- Who are they?
Describing the person or business buying products and services from you or your organization.
- What do they want to buy from you?
Identifying what types of products or services the person wants to buy from you.
- Why are they interested in purchasing those products or services?
This part of the ideal customer profile explains why the person is interested in buying these particular products or services.
- How often do they need these products or services?
How frequently this person needs the product or service he’s looking for.
- Where would they be likely to purchase them?
Here, the sales teams list the places where the person would most likely shop for the product or service.
A buyer persona dives much deeper and generally gets divided into different segments to guide sales and marketing efforts. But only a marketing agency has the resources and the manpower to exploit this power to its truest potential.
Now, let’s dive into how having buyer personas in your digital marketing arsenal can help you generate better leads.
Benefits of Buyer Personas for Lead Generation
Helps determine your ideal customer
Buyer personas rely on exhaustive surveys and detailed interviews with actual customers. Creating a buyer persona is a long and grueling process that attempts to understand the consumer psychology prevalent in the target market. A detailed buyer persona considers several aspects, including, but not limited to, customers’ past experiences, their present requirements, and their future expectations. It also provides a credible insight into the value proposition and the pain points of the target market.
By specifically tailoring the buyer persona to high-level demographic data of your target market, you ensure alignment between your sales strategy and the needs of the target audience. The resulting buyer persona will help you generate the most relevant leads and help determine your most attractive clients.
Increases conversion rates
An excellent buyer persona removes any guesswork from the equation. Your marketing strategy will be laser-focused because you know which customers to target and how to target them best. Your strategies will speak to your customers directly, and your accurate insight into their buying patterns will convince most of them about what you are offering. A well-crafted buyer persona makes this possible. It helps generate qualified B2B leads, and your conversion rates will improve exponentially as a direct result.
If you want to boost your conversion rate further, try to fashion your website landing pages around the model buyer persona. But getting the landing pages right can be difficult and may involve trial-and-error efforts on your part.
If you have any doubts about this, you should consider using GetLeadForms to create the perfect forms for your websites and landing pages. GetLeadForms will help you build multi step forms that will increase the conversion of your website visitors into qualified leads by up to three times.
Reduces costs to acquire customers
Marketing expenditures will likely run high in the absence of a strong buyer persona. They will lack focus, and you may end up targeting the wrong market. This will increase the marketing spending eventually, but without enough conversions to justify the spending. The effectiveness of your entire marketing campaign will come into question.
But if you take time to understand the demographics, firmographics, and pain points of your customers through buyer personas, your confidence in your marketing strategies increases multifold. You won’t be fumbling in the dark with your marketing approaches and increase your market budget in the process. Incorporating buyer personas into the top of your sales funnel will sharpen your marketing approach to target the right customers in the right market. This will help you reduce costs in acquiring new customers and ensure that you get better B2B leads at much less cost.
Run effective digital marketing campaigns
Without a well-defined buyer persona, your marketing campaign will be all over the place. But a detailed buyer persona will tell you everything you must know about your prospective customers — their likes and dislikes, what makes them tick, and what may put them off. This is helpful for three reasons:
- You will be able to prioritize your digital marketing efforts according to the location, business type, and job title. Your personalized content will resonate better, increasing the number of quality leads.
- You will create personalized customer experiences and content with which they can easily relate. This instant connection will make them visit your website and transform them into solid leads.
- You can write persuasive copies based on your model persona. This will generate qualified leads that will lure only the most promising customers.
- Your email campaigns will be more successful. The click-through rates will increase, and the lead response time will also be shorter.
Strengthen brand and product positioning
Thanks to a strong buyer persona, you already know what your ideal customer likes and prefers. You can use this knowledge to enhance the product positioning and your brand image in the minds of your customers. You can revamp any old marketing strategy that may not be as effective, revitalize your existing range of products or services and bring them in tune with your buyer personas.
Buyer personas also offer a tremendous amount of flexibility, and you can always modify them and keep yourself up to speed with your customers’ shifting tastes. The markets today are in a constant state of flux. It’s possible for your target customers to change their preferences over time. But by continuously modifying your buyer personas, you will be able to maintain robust brand and product positioning and continue generating strong B2B leads.
Get the right leads. Every single time
Nothing is better than getting the right customer, and nothing is worse than getting the wrong one. Undoubtedly, the most important benefit of having a buyer persona is that it will always generate the correct leads and point you towards the right customers. The right customer means you are already generating the right leads in terms of your sales funnel at any given moment – whether it’s from marketing campaigns or product releases – and you can easily identify them when they come into contact with your business – either by social media activity or website traffic and such.
If you get the right customer, then you’ll have an opportunity to convert those leads into paying customers, so there is no reason why you shouldn’t be using buyer personas to supercharge your lead generation.
