What are personas?
Personas represent a typical customer with
- specific needs
- Expectations
- Problems
- Worries and Fears (Pains)
- Ambitions and
- Aim.
How Do Personas Help in Marketing and Sales?
Marketing and sales activities that address the persona’s needs—specifically, their pain points and benefits—generate more customers and, as a result, greater sales success for your company.
Personas can be used to target sales activities effectively. Persona-centered marketing activities also generate more qualified leads. They are more likely to achieve the desired goal than general marketing and sales activities.
General marketing and sales activities aim to persuade a broad target audience to make a purchase. Persona-focused marketing and sales activities address the needs, fears, and desires of a specific persona and provide solutions.
How are personas created?
You create personas using real customer data as a team. To do this, you’ll need both a blueprint for the process and the cooperation of everyone in the company involved in the sales and marketing of the products and services you’re selling.
When defining your ideal customer, having a good team pays off. In a small business, it makes sense to conduct the persona workshop with all employees, since everyone’s input is valuable. In large companies, at least one person from each relevant department should participate. That person should be the one who knows your customers best.
Determine exactly which types of customers your persona represents. Typically, you’ll have several specific types of customers. In the B2B sector of a machine parts sales business, these could include the machine parts buyer, the CEO, the mechanic, and the logistics manager.
Essentially, the goal is to create detailed personas of those potential customers who influence the purchasing decision and the choice of supplier.
The Blueprint—or exactly what you should be working on
When creating personas, the first step is to determine exactly what needs to be developed. The blueprint includes data such as:
- General details about your fictional customer and their lifestyle habits
- Personality traits that influence behavior and purchasing decisions
- Facts About Education, Career, and Experience
- The persona's sources of information—that is, where she gets information for both her professional and personal life
- Challenges, fears, problems, or pain points, as well as questions the persona asks herself regarding her career and her work.
You can customize and expand what exactly you record based on the needs of the sales department.
It is important that the data be specific, as future marketing and sales activities will be geared toward targeting these personas and providing solutions for them.
The Customer Journey
The customer journey is based on your persona’s personal data and includes the following phases:
Awareness
At this stage, your persona is not yet aware of you. Your goal is to attract attention, spark interest, and encourage your persona to visit your website.
Consideration
At this stage, your persona is already familiar with your company and your products and services. The persona has visited your website and done some research. The goal now is to motivate the persona to consider making a purchase.
Decision-
The persona is already considering purchasing the necessary products or services from you, but is still unsure. Now it’s a matter of convincing your persona that you are exactly the right partner or supplier.
Loyalty
Once the purchase is complete, you want to turn the persona into a long-term customer. The goal is for the persona to trust you, be satisfied with your offerings, and continue to purchase products and services from you. This is the only way you can establish yourself as a long-term business partner.
When creating a customer persona, consider the following questions:
- At what stage of the customer journey is your persona?
- What are your client's goals?
- What are the touchpoints or points of contact with your company, brand, products, or services (e.g., LinkedIn, Google, ORF)?
- What are the thoughts and questions that your persona is grappling with during each phase?
- What emotions does your persona experience in relation to work and life in general?
- What messages does the sales department want to convey to potential customers?
- What content addresses your persona's needs, fears, problems, and goals—and offers solutions?
The Data—or Where the Information for Creating Your Personas Comes From
External data, such as market research and consumer studies, can be time-consuming and costly.
You have the necessary data internally, which you can use to develop a fictional customer profile through in-depth analysis.
Put yourself in the shoes of your fictional customer to understand their needs and decision-making processes, and ask specific questions to that end.
Sales staff know their potential customers—what they’re looking for, what their problems and concerns are, what positions they hold, and what questions they’re looking for answers to.
The personas for your sales team will be created in a professionally led workshop.
Tips for Creating Personas
Decide how many personas you need based on your target audience(s). Keep the number to a minimum so you can stay focused and avoid getting bogged down by too many similar profiles.
Define the persona very specifically, and be realistic and as detailed as possible.
Identify the persona’s desires, fears, needs, requirements, and goals in detail. You should address these in all marketing and sales activities, offer solutions, and build trust.
Discover what your ideal customer is passionate about. What catches their attention, and what are they looking for? This will help you connect with them on an emotional level in your follow-up activities.
Visualize the results and present them in a clear and concise manner. Give your persona a name and a face. This will help you keep them in mind during follow-up activities.
Benefits of Personas for Marketing and Sales
- Optimizing Products and Services in Operations
- Promoting understanding of different types of customers
- Leads to targeted marketing and sales activities
- Promotes customer acquisition and retention
- Understanding new developments and their impact on the target audience
- Increases revenue
- Improves the image
When you have realistic people in mind, you can better empathize with their problems, concerns, needs, and desires. This allows you to tailor your products and services precisely to their needs.
Using personas makes it easier for you to develop marketing and sales strategies that are tailored to the interests of your target audiences. They offer solutions to problems and address needs, rather than simply promoting the product itself. They also facilitate product development that is tailored to customer needs.
Why Do You Need Personas in Sales?
Creating personas in sales focuses on customers who are particularly valuable to your company. These are the ones who
- generate a lot of revenue
- Provide recommendations and testimonials
- Bring in new customers, or
- contribute to a positive corporate image through their own image.
Does your potential customer need the product you offer, but currently has a different supplier? Encourage them to switch to your product.
By creating personas, you can figure out how to encourage these customers to buy your product. Address their desires, fears, and needs. Solve their problems and build trust. Convince them of the value of your brand and your service.
The Value of Personas in Numbers
Studies by the Persona Institute show that 3–4 personas account for over 90% of a company’s revenue. Furthermore, persona-centered email campaigns achieve a 50% higher open rate and generate 5 times as many clicks.
A website’s organic traffic increases by approximately 55% when it is built using targeted content marketing based on personas. Additionally, potential customers are 48% more likely to consider a company as a solution provider that addresses their personal pain points and benefits.
How do you plan to proceed with the use of personas?
Once a persona has been developed, refined, and documented, it is used for all marketing and sales activities. The success of these efforts will be reflected, not least, in an increase in revenue.
Continue to develop each persona over the long term, just as your real customers continue to evolve. Information is gathered, knowledge expands, experiences are gained, desires are fulfilled, fears are alleviated, or new ones are added.
Be sure to incorporate these developments into the creation of your personas. Always keep in mind the phase your fictional customer is currently in. You may have started with a persona in the awareness phase, but after some time, that persona may have moved on to the consideration phase or even the purchase phase. Continue to refine the focus areas of your marketing and sales activities accordingly.
Conclusion
The sooner you engage with your persona, the greater the likelihood of closing the desired deal. You’ll attract new customers and turn them into loyal repeat customers. In the long run, persona-focused marketing and sales activities will boost your company’s revenue and success.
