Full Transcript:
In this episode, I'm going to talk about buyer personas and more specifically what the benefits are of buyer personas for a marketing team. Before I do that, I'll just quickly review what a buyer persona is for those who aren't as familiar. So a buyer persona is a one-page overview of the key types of people who you are targeting in your marketing. And some of them might be the actual buyers of your product. Others might be people who are influencing it or people who are the final decision makers, but aren't the day-to-day people.
You want to come up with around three personas based on who it is that you're targeting. So for example, you might have a persona around a professor if you're trying to get into a University and on that buyer persona, you are outlining a description of that person and then you're also outlining what their needs are, what their motivations are, what their pain points are that are related to whatever it is that you are selling. And then you also will highlight some of the resources that they trust in their role. And you could also add onto it a buying insights profile, which will outline a little bit more around what their journey is for when they are making a purchase and what factors they find important when they are buying. It basically gives you a high-level overview of who it is that you're speaking to and it brings to life what it is that you are working on in your marketing and who you're trying to reach. That hopefully gives you a little bit of an overview or review of what a buyer persona is.
And they are really important for marketing because ultimately they help align all of your marketing efforts. So right now in your marketing, maybe it's just you or you and one other person. As you grow, you're going to be adding in more people and some people are going to be working for you full-time in-house and they'll be pretty familiar with who you're targeting and what your product is. But then you're also going to be bringing in external people. You might bring in contractors to help with small projects, or you might hire agencies. And the more people you have involved, the more people you're going to need to educate about who it is that you're targeting. And the more important it's going to be that everyone is aligned on who you're trying to reach so that you're all working towards one goal and everything that you're creating is all aligned.
Personas are so important for your marketing in aligning what you're doing so that you are all creating activities for the same types of people. And ultimately by doing that it's going to make your marketing stronger. And the more personalized the personas are, the better your marketing is going to be. So you could create personas by just doing online research, and that should be done and it's definitely helpful and a good starting point. But the best personas are created from interviewing your customers, and that is where you're really going to find a lot of information that your marketing team can use that is going to make your marketing really unique to your company and your customers and the types of people that you're bringing in.
For example, I was working with an education company and we were creating personas and we found out that in those interviews the people that we were trying to sell to, they first started looking into solutions that led them to buy from this company when they were looking into evaluating their curriculum. This was at the high school level. So they were trying to figure out looking into workforce trends and skills that were needed in the workforce and what they might need in order to update the curriculum. So by understanding that from the interviews that we did for the personas and then incorporating them into the buyer personas, marketing efforts have all been altered and evolved in order to make sure that we are feeding into that need that was discovered through the buyer personas and that helps in creating all of our marketing activities.
Now we have blog posts that help educators learn about what skills are needed relating to the topics that they're teaching and some solutions for what their students can be learning and what they could be incorporating into their curriculum that will help their students be prepared for the workforce. We also do some speaking engagements at conferences that some of our buyer personas are at around these topics to help educate them. And then we do email campaigns that focus on this idea around what's going on in the workforce and what could they apply in their high school curriculum. And there are other things, but hopefully that just gives you an example of how buyer personas help you really align all of your marketing and they help you come up with new ideas that are really going to be impactful for your company because they are speaking directly to people who are buying from you.
So those are, to me, some of the main benefits of creating buyer personas. I definitely recommend going through that process and you're going to learn a lot just by listening to your customers and evaluating what messages and what activities you've been sending out to them from your company.
