You can’t talk about lead generation without mentioning buyer persona. So then, just what is a buyer persona, customer persona and ideal customer profile (ICP)?
This article looks into ideal customer profile, buyer persona, customer persona, and why they are important to your sales and marketing teams. We also show you how to build a buyer persona, and their connection to your marketing campaign.
By the end, you will have a good understanding of the impact of ICPs and personas on your bottom line.
Let’s get down to the definitions.
A buyer persona is simply a representation of your ideal customer, usually the people who make purchase decisions in a B2B business setup. Buyer personas help businesses to understand customers from a human-centric perspective. That is; what makes them tick? The aim of having personas is not to profile but to uncover behaviours to gain an understanding of why people accomplish goals. You may have a single or multiple buyer personas depending on the size of your business.Buyer personas help in attracting leads, allocating resources, and understanding what makes people make purchases. This makes your marketing campaign more effective.
While buyer persona is used interchangeably with customer persona, there’s a difference. Buyer personas give you a great overview of your customers, they are not equivalent to your target customers. A customer persona refers to buyer personas that are successfully converted. This means, they represent existing customers.
Conversely, an ideal customer profile refers to the company that would get more value from your products and services. These would usually have the fastest and most successful sales cycle and a great retention rate.
As a B2B business, you may sell to a wide range of businesses and appeal to a wide range of personas within these businesses. However, it’s more important to know where you win more.
ICPs and buyer personas let you increase your revenue significantly along with aligning your marketing and sales teams with your messaging and core value proposition. When your sales teams know who they’re talking to and how to connect with, then their efforts yield more.
Product and service teams may also use ideal customer profile and buyer personas to consider how to improve and build products and services to meet customer needs.
Buyer persona and ideal customer profile development is equally an important first step to ensuring the success of your marketing efforts regardless of the size of your B2B business.
Here are some reasons ideal customer profiles, customer and buyer personas, are important:
When you’re certain about who your target customers are and what they need, you can comfortably structure your marketing and promotional efforts appropriately. When you don’t know what your customers want, it is impossible to target them effectively.
Buyer personas give you a better understanding of how and why customers behave the way they do. This will help you understand them better so you have an advantage in promoting your service or product to them. You will develop content that is focused and speaks to their needs effortlessly.
Buyer personas and ideal customer profiles help you understand how customers move through the customer journey. From the moment they enter the top of the sales funnel to their conversion, you can clearly see why and how customers move from one stage to the next.
When you know who your customers truly are and their behaviour, you’re able to offer them exceptional customer experience. This makes it easier to move them through the customer journey.
Creating your ideal customer profile requires you to dig around for data. Some characteristics you can use to identify a company that is a perfect fit include:
Although not comprehensive, this is a great place to start when you want to identify your ideal customer. These are qualities that a lead needs to possess for you to qualify them to buy from you.
As you can already imagine, no two buyer personas are the same. There’s no right way to create a buyer persona. However, there are certain features that are common in most buyer personas. They include:
Elevator pitch – This is a summary of what you’ll do for your customers.
It’s obvious that customer personas let you create messaging and content that is appealing to your target audience. This is besides personalising your marketing for various segments of your audience.
This means that instead of sending a single generic lead nurturing email to everyone on your database, you’re able to segment them easily by the buyer persona and tailor the message to what you know about different personas.
You can also create negative personas if you want to tap into the added advantage of being able to single out bad contacts from the rest. This can also help in maintaining a low cost per customer and cost per head, hence more productivity.
Here are 4 ways you can use personas to guide the direction of your marketing efforts:
Creating buyer personas is no mean feat. Where do you begin? What questions will you ask? How do you come up with accurate conclusions from the responses?
The best way to create customer personas is through surveys, research and interviews that involve a mix of prospects, customers, and anyone that might align with your target audience. Let’s look at some methods you can use to gather information you need to create buyer personas:
Aim at asking demographic based questions through various channels that include in person, by telephone, and through online surveys. Include descriptive mannerisms and buzzwords of your persona that you’ll pick during conversations. This will make it easier for people on your sales and marketing teams to identify personas when talking to prospects.
Synthesise the information learned from the interviews. You can then use this information to tell them how your business can help them.
Include real quotes from interviews that exemplify what your personas are concerned about, what they want and who they are. From these, you can create a list of objections they may raise so your team is better prepared to address them when they get to speak with them.
It’s important to let people know how they should talk about your products and services with your persona. This includes a general elevator pitch positioning your solution in a manner that resonates with the persona. This will ensure everyone is speaking the same language when having conversations with customers and leads.
Personas are a great component, especially if you want to attract potential customers. When you don’t have a complete understanding of your customers, you’re likely to gamble on the results you’ll get. Developing personas is not only cost effective but an efficient way to focus your efforts and amplify your return on investment.
A buyer persona template lets you put together your persona profiles quickly and easily. Templates are usually customisable and editable so you can build your personas by choosing the information to include.
Filling a buyer persona template lets you map out the main customer demographics, goals, background, identifiers, and challenges. Using persona templates helps to save time and ensure everyone is on the same page.