The art of homing in on your target audience, discovering their interests, likes, wants, and preferences to gain an understanding of their needs, is critical to building that bridge between seller and buyer. We look at how you can build a persona in both B2C and B2B scenarios and provide direction and goals for marketing and sales efforts. Crafting accurate buyer personas can fill the gap you need to overcome to make that difference to your top line!
Find out more about how to build buyer personas in this blog post.
How to identify your target audience and build your ideal buyer persona?
Imagine this now. Two people are conversing. One is talking about their work and their need to become more productive and profitable. The other actively listens, processes the information, and suggests solutions. It's a mutual exchange where understanding and trust flow seamlessly, creating a positive human connection.
This is what an ideal prospect-seller conversation should look like - a friendly conversation between two parties where the customer shares their needs and preferences while the seller uses their knowledge to identify and deliver the right solution.
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Discovering your target audience and the target persona
To arrive at this stage of trust and understanding is a long process. For a seller, it means accurately identifying their target audience, reaching out, connecting, engaging, building trust, and then delivering value through solutions that resonate.
The target audience is a segment narrowed down from the larger population. The actual process involves dividing a larger market into smaller, distinct groups based on multiple parameters. The parameters used for segmentation vary depending on the industry, product, and specific marketing goals.
Target audience vs. Buyer persona
Establishing your target audience is the first step to understanding and recognizing your market. The next, more advanced step is creating the target buyer persona. What's the difference?
The target audience is a broader, more general group defined by demographics, geography, and broad characteristics shared by a population segment. These are people narrowed down and identified as people who could be potential buyers.
For example, a fitness app's target audience could be "young adults aged 18-30 who are interested in fitness and wellness."
The buyer persona is a detailed and semi-fictional representation of an ideal customer based on extensive research and data. It goes beyond demographics to include psychographic, behavioral, and contextual information, creating a more personalized and humanized profile. Buyer personas are more specific and individualized, focusing on a particular segment's unique needs, preferences, and behaviors within the target audience.
For example, A buyer persona for the fitness app could be "Active Anita," a 25-year-old yoga enthusiast who values convenience, seeks a balance between work and wellness, and prefers mobile fitness solutions.
While a target audience helps define the overall market, buyer personas enable businesses to personalize their marketing strategies and better connect with specific segments within that audience. Both concepts are essential for effective marketing, with buyer personas providing a more nuanced and human-focused approach within the broader target audience.
Building the target persona
Creating a detailed buyer persona involves gathering and analyzing information about your target audience to understand their needs, preferences, and behaviors. Here's a step-by-step guide to help you create detailed buyer personas:
- Define Your Objectives: Clearly outline the goals you want to achieve with your buyer personas. Are you looking to improve product development, enhance marketing strategies, or refine customer support?
- Conduct Market Research: Gather data about your target audience through surveys, interviews, and online research. Look for patterns in demographics, psychographics, and behavioral traits.
- Segment Your Audience: Identify distinct segments within your target market. These segments may have unique characteristics or preferences that require different approaches. For example, you might have different buyer personas for young professionals and retirees.
- Create Demographic Profiles: Build detailed demographic profiles for each segment, including age, gender, location, income level, education, and occupation. This information helps you understand the essential characteristics of your target audience.
- Explore Psychographic Factors: Dig deeper into your audience's psychographics, which includes values, interests, lifestyles, attitudes, and aspirations. This information provides insights into their motivations and decision-making processes.
- Identify Pain Points and Challenges: Understand your audience's problems and challenges. This information helps you tailor your products or services to address their specific needs and pain points.
- Analyze Buying Behavior: Examine how your audience makes purchasing decisions. Identify the factors that influence their choices, such as product features, pricing, brand loyalty, or recommendations from others.
- Consider Online Behavior: If applicable, analyze your audience's online behavior. Understand where they spend time online, what platforms they use, and how they engage with content. This is crucial for digital marketing strategies.
- Create Detailed Personas: Create detailed and fictionalized representations of your target audience based on the collected information. Each persona should have a name, job title, background, goals, challenges, and a brief narrative that brings the persona to life.
- Use Visuals and Templates: Consider using visual aids or templates to present your buyer personas. This makes it easier for your team to understand and align their efforts with the identified personas.
- Share and Refine: Distribute the buyer personas among your team members and stakeholders. Encourage feedback and be open to refining the personas as you gather more data and insights.
Keep in mind that buyer personas are not static. You will need to regularly update them based on new information and changes in your target market to ensure your strategies remain effective.
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Buyer persona = ICP
In a B2B scenario, the buyer persona could be a firm or an individual authority at the organization. The ideal customer profile (ICP) is often the buyer persona. In such cases an additional parameter is the inclusion of firmographic inputs.
Layer in firmographic details when your target persona or ICP is an organization. Firmographic data refers to details about a business; industry, company size, location, revenue, employee count, ownership type, structure, years in business, technology stack, strategic initiatives, partnerships, regulatory compliance, customer base, and legal structure.
Here’s how buyer personas in B2B marketing could look like:
Mastering the art of crafting personalized buyer personas, builds the foundation for engaging conversations, discovering your target audience and building lasting customer connections. While the process can be time consuming and involve a lot of data collection and analysis, remember that the more detailed the personas, the better the understanding of the target audience, and the more personalized the campaigns can be which will of course lead to higher conversion.
Invest in persona creation. It is only through understanding and connecting with the unique needs of individuals within the target audience that you will discover the key to successful, human-focused marketing.
To know more about targeted audience marketing, reach out to us at hello@thinkabm.com.
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