Why you need to create buyer personas – If your client base has slowly been dwindling even though there is no drastic change in income or social circumstances, the problem might be that you’ve lost touch with the person you’re selling to. People change through the years and as they do so do their needs, and it’s your job to make sure you’re keeping track of these differentiations. An outdated buyer persona is a useless buyer persona so its high-time you brushed the cobwebs off of some of your profiles and create buyer personas.
Put some Priority When you Create Buyer Personas
If you’re concerned with your buyer personas being outdated, it might be because they’ve been cooking on the backburner for the last decade while other concerns took their place as key priorities. But now that the times and the people you’re selling to have changed, you need to brush the dust off and put your efforts into that forgotten gem and get it working for you again. It takes some work to really get to know what people want, and if you think that you know what people want just because you want the same things then you’re running a business off assumptions, and that’s a recipe for bankruptcy. But who knows, maybe it’ll work out for you. I mean, Borders was convinced people didn’t want eBooks and that worked out okay for them…
What does the buyer of today need from you? What isn’t being provided by your competitors that the crowds are asking for? When and how do buyers want to access your products and services? Pay attention to these questions because your answers to them should be the things directing your marketing strategy, not the other way around.
Check-in On Your Audience
The reason your personas are out of date is because you haven’t been outside in years. You made an initial profile of your typical customer and then wrote the matter off as a job-well-done. Unfortunately, with buyer personas the job is never done. You should be sending surveys and making phone calls to customers and charting their progression throughout the year. See how your key demographic shifts its needs from season to season and year to year and reimage yourself accordingly. How many times you can check-in without being intrusive is up to you to figure out, but you should have multiple scouting parties sent out each year to scope the terrain.
Most importantly, when you create buyer personas you need to make sure you’re thinking about them as people and not simply as numbers to crunch. You’re filling out profiles of actual people – it’s not a science. Unfortunately, monotony is the ultimate anesthetic and it’s common to become detached when working on the same project over and over.
That’s why when your team is going to create buyer personas you should help them humanize each persona by giving them faces of actual clients to look at so they remember that they’re not just filling out dotted lines. It’s a simple exercise in human psychology, but it works like a cliché when looking to create buyer personas. Just remember, an accurate profile means a larger client base, and last time I checked that’s what businesses were going for.
