Why should you create buyer personas?

A buyer persona is a representation of your customer. It's a fictional idea of who your customer is and what he or she wants or doesn't want. It's called a marketing persona because we build an idea in our heads about an ideal customer. We use buyer personas to represent target audiences to whom we direct all our content, products and every other piece of messaging. They are the focus of every aspect of our buyer's journey, from the initial lead generation through lead conversion.

Buyer personas may be much more essential to your content creation and product development process than you even realize. To envision compelling reasons to buy, you must have a target in your head. Who are you really trying to convince and why? How does the buyer persona help?

• You must understand your customers' wants and needs. What are their motivations? Why are they attracted to your product? What makes them ideal candidates to move forward to buy?
• Content Development. Once you understand the buyer personas you're targeting, it's so much easier to create content that will address the specific needs of your customers. You've already envisioned their concerns and behaviors. You know all the information you need to focus your content on the ideal customers, based on your buyer personas.

So, yes, you should create buyer personas, and here's how to start.

It would be wonderful if you could snap your fingers and magically create the buyer personas that would help you successfully target your audiences, but it's not that simple. It takes time, careful deliberation and the willingness to implement a number of lead generation tactics, optimization techniques and referral generation strategies.

• Do your due diligence. To determine your buyer personas, you must ask lots of questions via surveys and interviews. You must conduct research. You're trying to determine what factors make one prospect buy, while another doesn't.
• You already have a wealth of information for your buyer personas that's literally at your fingertips within your customer databases. If you've never done so before, now's the time to search your databases and uncover the hidden treasure of trends.
• Form Entry. The web forms on your website is another untapped resource. Many online forms ask only for the contact's name, phone number and email address, but this interaction is the perfect opportunity to glean much more valuable information from your prospects.
• When your sales people speak to prospects, they get a solid understanding of the person, their wants and needs and their buyer journey. Interview the teams interacting with customers in developing your personas.

The O360 platform offers insights based on the natural, unaided voice of your customers that provide the basis for developing buyer personas. We use machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to help you understand who your customers are, which products and product categories interest them and the occasions and events that drive them to buy and consume those products.

With O360 Consumer Portraits, you gain a better understanding of your customers and then can create personas to optimize content for your customer. To learn more about O360 and how we can help, sign up for a demo today.