Imagine you’re a tech enthusiast looking for a new smartphone. You visit an area with a chain of electronic stores, but that one store catches your eye. There’s a captivating sign by the door that reads, ‘The Perfect Gadget for All Your Tech Needs’. That’s an example of a buyer persona right there. The store understands the audience that it needs to cater to and knows what to say to get them through the door. But not all products are as simply understood, and not everything can be categorised into black and white. For example, B2B products have a more intricate process and need a deeper understanding of industry-specific challenges to tailor-make appropriate communicational strategies.
Buyer personas, in that case, is not about identifying one need and one segment of your target audience. It’s about building a research-based profile that identifies multiple sets of your target audience, understands their needs, what challenges do they face and how they make their decisions.
In today’s highly competitive business landscape, the need to understand audiences is inevitable – it’s either a do or a die situation. Why so? Let’s find out.
Competitive advantage
Expanding your business persona helps you stay attuned to the evolving needs of your customers. It helps you stray away from generalised assumptions, like health bars are only consumed by individuals who hit the gym on a regular basis. Understanding your audience will help alter value propositions and develop unique selling points that ‘speak’ to the customer in a language that they relate with.
Personalised communication
Your customers aren’t interested in hearing you talk about your products, their features or edge over others if you’re not actually telling them how it can solve their problems.
Communication isn’t about what you do, but rather about what your customer needs. When your messages start conveying that, you build trust in the eyes of your customers, and then it’s only a matter of time until they gravitate towards you to cater to their needs.
It’s for everyone
Buyer personas are important with businesses that obviously fulfil the needs of large sets of audiences, but is it also important to identify buyer personas for, let’s say, a product as focused as that of kids’ biscuits?
The short answer is, yes.
As the owner of a business that sells biscuits for kids, it’s simple to say that your target audience is kids – but it’s also the parents of the kids who hold the power to purchase. Through research, you’ll go on to understand the age, region, class and type of your customers – which will help you market your products even better. Devising communication plans will be easier and surely more effective.
Developing buyer personas is a combination of in-depth internal and external research. If you need help with expanding your buyer personas and understanding your audiences, please contact us.
