Buyer persona redefined – understanding your buyer persona.

Marketing
April 23, 2020

You have been selling to the wrong buyer persona the whole time.

There is a distinct likelihood that if you can create a service or a product, you will most likely have someone willing to purchase the good or pay you for the service. However, the viable market for such a product or service may not be sustainable to make it a good business.

Creating a great product or carving out a service is just one part of the equation, the other part of the equation, which is the part we are interested in today, is about finding the right set of persons who need that service or the product. All over, the most popular recommendation you can get is to build a product first then worry about finding the right set of people who will buy.

If you handle your business in the manner described above, you may just have been putting the cart before the horse the whole time. Veterans in the marketing space would have suggested that you start by defining those you intend selling your product or service to before you even commence providing that service.

Buyer persona explained — Photo by Anton Luzhkovsky on Unsplash

There are many benefits to making these decisions before you go all out into production and we will examine some of them here.

There are many arguments as to which one should come first – the product or knowing the right set of persons you’ll be selling to. That won’t be our focus here. We just need you to see for yourself why you should be sure of who you are producing for.

Asides making your marketing focus easier, it helps you even make better decisions about how the product should look and how best it would satisfy your target end user.

Let’s start by getting your Customer Avatar right.

A customer avatar and a buyer persona are most times used interchangeably between sales and marketing professionals. Is there a difference between both terms? Not much of a difference. So, let’s look at Customer avatar and get it right.

A great marketing campaign has among other things brand awareness campaigns, lead generation campaigns, automation campaigns to help nurture your leads but nothing happens until you very well examine the exact set of persons you are looking to sell to.

When you create a customer avatar, you work on creating a specific person to the barest details we need to know that will influence how we market to the customer. We need details such as their names, what they do for a living, where they work, an idea of what their pay range, the kind of cars they use, the kind of places they love to hang out, the circles they move around in, every little detail is not random, it is specific.

Yes, every business needs a clear customer avatar. So, go back, take a look at the details you will need to get from the people who would fall into the bracket of your ideal customer avatar and come back to this point so we can move forward. You can use this list to check out your ideal customer avatar.

This is how you use the details you glean from an extensive customer research to target your customer. So, Mr. A, our target, is married to one wife, has 4 kids, a dog, a cat and works in a real estate firm. Mr. A, after work, would prefer to dash home to his family for some family time. If he decides to socialize, it would majorly be on a weekend or a public holiday. Because of how big his family is, Mr. A uses an SUV but because Mr. A is an early adopter, he prefers that his SUV be equipped with the latest tech gears he can afford on his pay. Mr. A gets his news from popular news channels and a few tech sites.

Now that we know these details about Mr. A, we can start creating a marketing plan which would include the channels we are most likely going to get him to buy our product. An early adopter would be more receptive to new ideas from either the television or via online channels he has interests in.

So, a great place to target his attention would be popular news channels and the tech sites he has interests in. If he loves family time, try to target family shows with show times around evening when he would be back from work. Mr. A is a family person so he could be influenced by family. Reach the children via social platforms and watch as they influence Mr. A. Seen how that works?

How to choose your ideal buyer persona

We have gone through a customer avatar and you know how to get yours. Our next task is to see how the customer avatar fits your business and how your business should react to the profile you created of your ideal customer.

When you create products, you most likely are not creating just one to suit one set of people alone. You are more prone to having options of the same product so that different people can be able to afford what you have to offer.

So, you may see an offer that goes for 3 different prices with 3 different perks to each price. What’s happening there is way more than qualifying the prospects. It’s also a means to qualify 3 ideal buyer personas or 3 different people on our customer avatars.

This means you should not set out for a business with only one customer avatar. You should have multiple selections and different persons in your avatar collection. Why you need to do this is to be able to cover the different kind of persons who might be interested in what you are offering.

When you create multiple avatars, it helps you create either multiple products to cover them or you create different pricing models to be able to accommodate them. Using the example above, Mr. B has a product – a tech Gadget to sell. Mr. B knows well to target our Mr. A from the customer avatar we created. But Mr. A is not enough to make Mr. B have maximum sales to keep the company afloat.

Mr. B has to create more profiles to suit different kinds of persons who would also be interested in the tech gadget created. Here comes in Mr. C. Mr. C is just a single man who works in a bank. Mr. C loves the good life so after work, he makes out time to hang out with friends at a high-class bar close to his workplace. Mr. C loves gadgets a lot but he is more cautious about buying only gadgets that he needs or that would solve a problem for him.

Targeting Mr. C may take another route but it’s still the same product sale we are working on. So, multiple routes but all leading to the same sale. Also, the method of nurturing Mr. C for this sale would be different than the method we would employ for Mr. A.

Taking a look at the different avatars we have created will show you something new – there is a path of objections for each different avatar and our nurturing process would take into consideration the difference in what each avatar needs and create a perfect response to all their objections.

Way importantly, stop thinking of your customers as everyone. You waste marketing budget trying to sell to an unidentified set of persons. Like throwing a lot of spaghetti against the wall, some of them would stick but it would be way better to work a system that works perfectly. Now you have a better understanding of choosing the right buyer persona. Work with it. If you need a more detailed consultation with creating your buyer persona, send a message.