Kylie is 25 years old, single, and has an older dog she rescued from the humane society while in college. She runs her own new home interior design company, mostly out of her home office and the coffee shop on her street. Although, she occasionally rents flexible professional meeting spaces for appointments with clients.
Her main concern is how to grow her company and get new leads from social media, word of mouth, content marketing, and other channels, as well as get more well-versed in email marketing.
Kylie also posts the before-and-after pictures of her interior design work on her professional Instagram page, which has recently started to take off and get her noticed by more and more new clients in her city.
Kylie also loves running half marathons, visiting local breweries, and exploring new-to-her national parks whenever she can. She hates online dating and refuses to sign up for it.
But Kylie Montgomery isn’t a real person (unless your name is Kylie Montgomery too, in which case, you’re totally real). In this case, Kylie is a buyer persona. She is a fictitious, specific, narrative of who your ideal customer is.
And Kylie is vital to your business’s growth.
We all crave personalized service: Personalized products, personalized content, personalized responses. It’s why promotional emails with personalized subject lines using our own names get opened 29% more frequently and have a 41% higher click-through rate. We love personalization.
The best way to provide this individualized attention? By creating characters like Kylie who represent a specific group of people who you want to do business with; by creating a buyer persona.
When you are examining who is your exact, ideal customer, a buyer persona is like a semi-fictionalized version of who that person is. This isn’t just based on a whim or a general thought about who you would like your buyer persona to be, it is based on real market data and actual research about your company.
Creating a thorough, detailed buyer persona for your company will provide your company with clarity, focus, and structure for how you should market your business, where you spend most of your time and resources, and how you develop your products. This can also help you improve overall customer experience, so not only are your customers spending more, they are happier and more loyal to your company too!
Dividing your customer base into at least two groups like this helps narrow down who your target audience is (or isn’t) so that you can focus your marketing on the kind of customers you are seeking. This allows you to focus your attention, your resources, and your marketing budget in the most effective way possible, while still getting the best possible results.
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In order to create a buyer persona, you need to collect information about your customers, but you also want to do this without bothering them or seeming nosy. It shouldn’t feel like an intrusion or an annoyance to your customers to provide this data, but you should also do your best to collect whatever information you can.
Just how valuable is this data? It’s everything. According to several Gallup polls, the companies that collect this data and use it to tailor their marketing and their products to their customers outperform their peers in sales growth AND 25% in gross margin sales.
So how can you obtain this customer data?
And now we get to put everything together!
With Hubspot, I’ve created my own handy template to segment customer data into different categories and now you can too! Once you’ve done this, it’s much easier to step back and learn more about who your buyer persona is. It’s separated into the following categories:
You can access HubSpot’s free template too. Click here for the totally free template to create your business’s very own buyer persona.
If you’re looking for the best way to reach your customers? Ask them.
What kind of marketing campaign should you launch next? Ask your customers.
Running out of blog topics or fresh content ideas? Ask your customers.
Doubting the effectiveness of your homepage, and whether or not it draws visitors in? Ask your customers.
It should always go back to what the customer wants. And if you provide your customers with what they want? That’s how your business will grow and expand. And creating a buyer persona makes that process so much easier!
If you're like Kylie, I bet you're wondering how to use all this new information to conquer email marketing, increase sales, and leads online too. And I can help you get there.