Consumer behavior has changed a lot in recent years, especially due to the expansion and access to digital technologies. If a customer before would go to your company to obtain more information about your services or products, today he does this whole process on the internet.
Only when he is in the decision stage does he contact your brand for more specific information, which in a way makes it difficult to attract and convert more customers to your company.
The way to stand out in this digital environment and capture new customers is to develop more assertive marketing strategies. For this, the use of personas is vital for you to reach your audience and achieve better results.
And given that a persona is essential to your strategy, the big question is: do you know how to build one? If you are starting to invest in Content Marketing, this is the right post for you! Continue reading and discover the importance of creation of a person and how to develop yours.
Check it out in this post:
- What are personas?
- What is the difference between persona and target audience?
- What types of personas?
- Buyer Persona:
- Persona audiences:
- Brand Persona:
- Photo persona:
- How to build a buyer persona?
- How important are personas to your Digital Marketing strategies?
Good reading!
What are personas?
Personas or Buyer Personas are semi-fictional characters of your ideal customers, created based on real data collected by your company. This data can be:
- sociodemographic;
- psychographics;
- behavioral;
- lifestyle;
- beliefs and values.
As you can imagine, this is data that we don't always have at hand. After all, do you know your client's psychographic data? Therefore, to create your persona, you need to invest in in-depth research on what customers think, feel, hear, see, say and do.
What is the difference between persona and target audience?
It is normal that when we talk about personas, some people get confused with the target Audience and in case you don't know the difference between them, that's fine, we're here to explain, okay?
First, you need to keep in mind that these are very different concepts. That's right, personas and target audience are NOT synonymous.
In summary, the target audience presents broader information and invests in more general definitions, speaking about a broader portion of your audience.
The persona, as we mentioned in the previous topic, is more personalized, specific, detailed and humanized, and therefore the need for different data to build it as close to your ideal client.
Now that the difference between the two is clear, we want to ask you a question: did you know that there is more than one type of persona? Continue reading and learn about the four types of existing personas in the next topic.
What types of personas?
In addition to the Buyer Persona, there are other types of personas that can be built by your company. Do you know what they are? In total, we can divide it into four classifications:
- Buyer persona;
- Persona audiences;
- Brand persona;
- Photo persona.
Next, we'll address each of them and explain how the four types of personas work in practice.
Read too:
- How to decrease the rejection rate and increase the conversion?;
- 5 ways of how to capture students;
- How to retain customers? Understand how the CRM can help you!
Buyer persona
As we talked about in the topic above, the Buyer Persona is the representation of your ideal client. This type of persona is the most used within companies, mainly to guide the Content Marketing, customer service and sales teams.
The main objective of Buyer Persona production is to analyze and discover consumer behavior, pain points, goals and stipulate possible solutions throughout their buying journey.
Persona audiences
You know those people who only consume your content online? Whether on social networks, websites, applications or even in a blog like this, there are customers who consume their materials 100% online.
And to represent this public, there is the Audience persona, which represents the user's profile, taste and behavior on the Internet. The purpose of this persona is precisely to accompany your potential customers online.
So, if your focus is on increasing traffic to your website or consolidating your brand in the digital environment, you should bet on creating this persona.
Brand Persona
And who said that personas are only referring to your customers? In fact, there are also personas focused on the company's profile, as is the case of Brand Persona.
The purpose of creating this persona is to bring your company closer to your potential client and align their profile and vision, making it even more humanized.
Photo Persona
Maybe this is a new term for you, but this type of persona is what precedes the Buyer Persona. It's like an initial version, a prototype of the persona, as the name suggests.
However, unlike Buyer Persona, this type is built based on brainstorming within the company, without as much data or specifications.
How to build a Buyer Persona?
Now that you've understood what personas are and what their types are, it's essential to know how to develop one for your company. With that in mind, we have prepared a checklist with some tips for you to put into practice and produce your buyer persona:
- Analyze the profile of your current customers, identifying socio demographic data. This can be done from the data contained in your CRM;
- Identify your customers' hobbies, goals, dreams, needs and challenges. This can be done with personal interviews or online forms, to facilitate data distribution and consolidation;
- Create empathy maps, in order to know what your customers think, feel, say, do, hear and see. The aim is to know their behavior on a daily basis;
- After raising all the data, consolidate them in order to discover similar characteristics, grouping them;
- Based on these groups, define a “face” for your persona, give a name, profession, age, marital status, etc., as if it were a real person;
- Finally, share your personas with the entire team. They will help guide not only marketing and sales strategies, but also customer service.
How important are personas to your Digital Marketing strategies?
If you are looking for tips to increase sales, know that personas can be used in sales strategies marketing digital to make them even more assertive.
In practice, how to give someone a gift: if you know the person in depth, you know exactly what they need; if you don't know, it's hard to define what will please or not.
For example: if you know that one of the barriers for a lead to complete the purchase is the cost of products or services, you can present alternatives such as special discounts or installment options.
If, on the other hand, the difficulty is which product to choose, once you meet the potential customer, you can nurture them with email marketing and give them all the necessary information so that the lead can make an informed decision.
Always thinking about the personas before executing any attraction strategy, you are able to convert more leads into customers, saying exactly what they need to hear, when they need to hear it.
When it comes to sales techniques, personas help you understand what the customers' objections are when choosing a company and so you can invest in marketing actions to get around them.
This is the case, for example, of customers who are reluctant to purchase such a service because of a comment on social media.
In the sales process, the seller can highlight at the time of negotiation that the company has years of experience and is a reference in the sector, emphasizing that its products are used throughout Brazil. In addition, your brand can also use testimonials from other customers as a selling point.
The great contribution of personas to marketing and sales strategies lies in understanding what customers need and providing them with solutions that help them make better decisions during their journey.
When you become a reference for what they need, when purchasing that service or product, your company always comes first.
After a potential customer becomes a lead, it's time to qualify them and for that we have the right content for you! Did you like this subject? Then check out our post on: what is Inbound Marketing and how to prospect?
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