Do Your Buyer Personas Collect Dust? Get Real-World Value

Striving to understand your target audience and what makes them tick is standard procedure for marketers. It’s easy to get caught up in demographics, firsthand stories, and assumptions and create detailed buyer profiles that don’t offer much value. Knowing what car someone drives or which school they attended can be useful, but it won’t help influence their decision-making process or where they research information before making a purchase.

An effective buyer persona offers real world insight into someone’s priorities, and how they think and weigh their options. Buyer personas must be more than detailed descriptions of a fictional person to bring tangible ROI to your team. Here’s how:

Enter a new market with a sharpened spear

Useful buyer personas are built from speaking to real people in phone interviews. Imagine that! 😛 Yet, a shocking amount of assumed buyer details are gleaned from strategy sessions between sales and marketing teams that don’t consult one actual buyer. Hearing the precise language buyers use, their tone of voice and how they answer questions is priceless context to create rich buyer personas. This insight removes the guesswork about who you really sell to and their typical buying behaviors. It helps you develop an informed, go-to-market strategy that keeps pace with buyers and addresses their concerns. Creating buyer personas from whiteboard sessions with the sales team that don’t include speaking to an actual customer leaves you with nothing more than a one-dimensional buyer profile.

Ignite lackluster sales and marketing results

No matter how high tech and valuable your offering may be, you are marketing and selling to humans, not corporate entities. A person ultimately decides which software solution to buy or which automation to deploy across the organization. And, if you get your input from a sale team, then you’re locked into the prospect of the moment. Buyer personas focused on actual buyers examine their real priorities, perceived barriers and the goals they seek to accomplish, and the feedback is designed to grow alongside your clients.

Armed with meaningful insight from interviews with real buyers, sales and marketing teams have the insight to target their prospects with laser accuracy instead of casting a wide net in a look-alike demographic and hoping they bite. The key to conversions is wearing someone’s avatar and getting in their head to understand their true motivations and how they think.

Smash silos and centralize customer/buyer understanding

Each department that deals with buyers typically operates based on their own siloed perceptions. Many organizations, however, don’t communicate their findings or beliefs to each other, which leaves the marketing and sales efforts woefully lacking.

Buyer personas sourced from interviews offer common understanding and language that informs sales and marketing efforts to boost ROI. The small details gleaned from interviews can mean the difference between finding the exact keyword to use in ads or a subtle tone shift that resonates better with buyers. Meaningful buyer personas offer a centralized “source of truth” that maintains consistent language and understanding across departments in a company.

The voice of the buyer is the North Star

We understand the importance of buyer personas that excavate deeper insight into how a customer thinks and what elements factor into their decision. That’s why our persona project leads at HCI Marketing and Communications are certified by the Buyer Persona Institute. We ask the right questions and listen. A meaningful buyer persona ignites sales performance by unlocking buyer perspectives.

Ready to learn more about your customers? We can help.

Get in touch.