Humanizing Buyer Personas

A buyer persona is an assessment of the characteristic features and habits of an ideal customer or target client. Evaluating the different buyer personas that your company serves can help customize the buyer experience. 86% of potential buyers are more likely to make a purchase when they are provided with a personalized buying experience. 36% of companies have achieved a shorter sales cycle when adopting marketing strategies that revolve around buyer personas. This points towards how advertisement campaigns, marketing strategies, and sales pitches have better results if you define a customer base by buyer personas.

From the several perks of using buyer personas, the most standard reasons to adopt buyer personas are:

• Organic reach – Find and connect with ideal clients. Approaching clients who are in need/want of your services/products gives better conversion rates. Instead of throwing darts in the dark by generalized marketing, focus on the target buyer personas to reach the appropriate customers.

• Customer engagement – Connecting with customers is half the step. Customer retention by equipping personalized email and marketing strategies through buyer personas can get better customer engagement.

• Effective marketing – Following buyer personas can save time, money, and labor. 51% of digital marketers say that personalization is their number one priority since everything else follows.

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• Client-driven business – The buyer/customer is the priority. Using buyer personas can help provide services/products that are required and demanded by the customers. Data-driven marketing strategies are more likely to succeed.

Humanizing buyer personas for B2B companies

The latest issue in most businesses is how companies are too dependant on predictions and statistics that they forget their buyers are real people. Having realistic buyer personas that are more human rather than a data list offers better insights. Human-centred or buyer-centered approach can bring a more humanistic understanding and hence a more natural form of personalization of the buyer experience. Buyer personas can help achieve the humanizing factor that every marketing strategy needs.

• Research – Ask the right questions about your ideal buyer. Collect data and demographics that define their personality and habits. Assign these key features to your customers.
• Segment – After arriving at an ideal customer base, try to categorize or segment them into groups of buyer personas. Further specialization can be equipped through segmentation. There are probably several spectrums of ideal buyers that the business serves. Hence shortlist the priority buyer personas for initial targeting.
• Understand – Try to step into the shoes of your buyer personas and understand their needs, goals, and perspectives about your business.

Tools to help create buyer personas

1. Xtensio – It is a free platform that offers an all-in-one marketing and business development forum. It is used to organize and keep track of business homework, create branded content, co-work with colleagues online and manage living documents. It has several features, among which creating, editing, and maintaining buyer personas are one.

Features – Content creation, centralized communications, templates, plans, competitive analysis.

2. Survey monkey – It is a customer experience management and development platform to use data and collaborators such as Mailchimp and Eventbrite, arriving at insights and analytics on the ideal customer/buyer base.

Features – Event planning, market research tools, survey generators, A/B tests, 360 review template, NPS survey, qualitative and quantitative research.

3. Personapp – Simplifies the process by making it easier to understand and use. Data input about demographics, buying goals, company objectives, customer behavior, etc., are followed through to edit buyer personas.

Features – Easy conceptualization, data input, and maintenance, buyer persona development, and segmentation.

4. Hubspot’s ‘makemypersona’ – It is an inbound marketing initiative by HubSpot. It offers step-by-step assistance and suggestions in creating realistic buyer personas.

Features – Avatars, nicknames, and easier to navigate persona development and management tool

5. Mnemonic AI – It is fully automated and equipped with the assistance of artificial intelligence software, thus decreasing the workload. Image generation, data analysis, and persona drafting are carried out by AI-aided systems.

Features – data-driven persona generations, incorporate persona complexities and layers making them realistic, AI assistance.

6. Userforge – It is easy to access and create buyer personas with segmentation options and provides mapping dashboard features.

Features – Persona templates, customizable story templates to add realistic and empathetic personas, integrated image library, customer visualization features, over 1000 icons, and customizable text output.

7. Smaply – It is a great tool that makes marketing easier. It creates visual aids and representations of marketing plans, sales approaches, tactics, personas, and more.

Features – journey mapping tool, persona mapping tools, personalized insights.

Not all marketing strategies work for the spectrum of customers that a company serves. Most companies serve a variety of customer profiles belonging to different age groups, economic classes, careers, and locations. Quicker organic reach can be enabled by setting a list of criteria to define your ideal customer. 93% of companies have reported better results when segmenting their buyer personas.

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