Developing Personas for Your Business - Small Dog Creative Blog
What is a business persona?
Business personas are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers. They help you better understand your customers and prospects and make it easier for you to tailor content to their specific needs, behaviors, and concerns. The strongest buyer personas are based on market research as well as on insights you’ve gathered from your actual customer base. Depending on your business, you could have as few as one or two personas, or as many as 10 or 20.
Personas allow you to personalize or target your marketing for different segments of your audience. For example, instead of sending the same lead nurturing emails to everyone in your database, you can segment by buyer persona and tailor your messaging according to what you know about those different personalities.
Personas also allow a business to target better leads. The more you know about your “ideal client,” the better, because entire campaigns can be built around attracting more of those specific types of clients.
Buyer personas are created through diligent research on your target audience. Your target audience will include a mix of current customers, prospective customers, and others outside of your current database.
Consider reaching out to a couple of your top customers for feedback and strive to find out more about their buying process by asking questions like:
“What research did you conduct before making your purchase?”
“What pain point does this solution address that others did not?”
The goal is to find out more about their habits and characteristics so that you can attract more and more like-minded and similarly awesome customers.
As you gain more and more insight into your target audience, you can begin to build your persona(s).
Assign your persona(s) the following:
Once you’ve created your buyer persona, the next step is to apply your new knowledge to your marketing strategies going forward.
What challenges does my persona face?
What solution can my business provide?
What can we do to help them achieve their personal goals?
What objections would this persona have to buying my product or service?
What sort of tone and messaging should I use to best appeal to this persona?
How do I plan to communicate with them based on their preferred communication methods?
From here, develop your elevator pitch and begin to lay out your marketing game-plan. Having personas will help you to design a strategy that will resonate best with your target audience.
As you embark on your marketing journey, don’t forget that Small Dog Creative is here to help. Our expert team can work with you on your marketing goals to help create the best persona that fits your business.