When you build and market your products, do you have a targeted buyer you know intimately?

Do you speak directly to customers in all your communication?

Do you have "catchy jingles" and "sexy messaging" targeted to "anyone with money"?

A persona is a short biography of the typical customer; not just a job description but a person description. It typically notes the buyer’s background, daily activities, and how they deal with their current set of problems. The more experience you have in your market, the more obvious the personas become.

By grouping buyers into distinct groups, by understanding the problems these groups have and how you can solve them, and then documenting everything you know about each buyer persona, your hard work to create just the right message becomes much easier.

But many companies do not create buyer personas. Instead, without a targeted group of buyers with specific unresolved needs, they flounder. They see everyone as a possible customer and their marketing expenditures, as a percentage of total revenue, are much higher than tuned in organizations. Some do segment their market, but unfortunately it’s often based on their own egotistical view from inside the organization, not looking from the outside in.

How do you get started building buyer personas? Try the following:

1. Get out of the office and interview your market
2. Put yourself into your buyer's world as much as possible
3. Name your buyer persona(s)
4. Develop a written document on each persona
5. Share persona documents across your organization

Still not sure you need to develop buyer personas? If you are developing and launching products without a specific buyer group in mind, what happens when you ask/observe the following:

1. What group of buyers is this the perfect solution for? If the answer  is "I don't know"or some vague category like "small businesses" there's no need to ask any more questions!
2. Can you show me the description of the typical buyer this product was designed to help?
3. Do you hear "if our product just had ________, it  would sell better”?
4. Are Marketing and Product Management arguing about who, and/or how, to write the marketing message for the product or service?
5. Do your marketing materials communicate simple answers to the questions buyers are asking in the words they use when describing their problems?
6. Is the necessary information to design or launch a product written down or just in someone’s head?
7. Do you know who else influences the buying decision of this product?

If you receive blank stares, “I’m not sure” or  “no” we recommend you focus on developing buyer personas.

Go to Step 3...Quantify the Impact

If you would like to learn more about understanding buyer personas, please contact us.