- Inbound marketing at its core is all about humanising
and creating relationships with your prospects,
in a wild rife with virtual conversations
and technological interaction,
let's face it, we crave realness.
Developing a buyer persona is a 100% the best way
to understand the relationship between you and your consumer
and learn the ins and outs of who you're engaging with.
With a little research and some real life data
you can easily take the guesswork out of the equation
and identify who your customers really are.
(upbeat music)
Hey guys, it's Olivia here from Neighbourhood
where we help brands find, sell, and keep their people.
So what is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a semi fictional representation
of an ideal customer
informed by marketing research and real data
about your existing audience.
Identifying the personas you're targeting
will transform your ability to attract, engage
and delight your customers.
Essentially, putting yourself in their shoes
will make your interactions more effective.
So now you've got that down pat,
let's look at some key questions
you should be asking to paint a clearer picture.
In doing so, you'll be able to design personal experiences
for all your prospects working in each and every way
towards the inbound methodology.
First up learn about your customer.
Personalization begins with getting personal.
So start by defining the basic demographic information
that gives you a summary of your customer.
The trick to all of this is to identify
what's relevant to your product or service
and use this to improve how and what you communicate,
for example, for a company or product,
which revolves heavily around technology,
finding out how frequently someone
uses their phone maybe more relevant,
to get the ball rolling, here are some ideas.
Think about someone's age, gender, nationality,
household income, disposable income,
whether the buyer lives in an urban, suburban,
or rural environment.
Individual hobbies level of education and the company,
or type of work that they do.
Moreover, figuring out someone's why
will provide the greatest Intel on them
in terms of creating a buyer persona.
So the following points will be the most critical
in better understanding your customers.
Look at things like biggest challenges, career goals,
and fears or pain points.
It's really important that you gather
a fair number of sources and viewpoints
to ensure you make a more accurate persona,
therefore, helping you to gain the resources,
to build a more personalised relationship
between you and your audience.
Essentially, you want to identify the demographic,
social and geographical stats
that make your customer an individual,
but how are you gonna get those answers?
Well, it's a start off,
you could survey existing customers,
invest in one on one interviews, check your analytics,
or even talk to your employees.
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Now that you've got all this information
and you've collected answers from your buyers,
it's time to put it to use
by determining how to segment your customers
if you don't know where to begin, don't stress,
it's not unusual for the information
to pull you multiple different directions,
just remember that you'll be creating multiple personas
for the different types of people you target.
With any business, you'll be interacting
with an array of different people.
So while these categories will identify the segments,
they're definitely not overly specific or alienating
to better explain, let's imagine
that we run a website design service to businesses.
While reaching out to prospective customers,
we will tend to encounter two different types of people,
tech savvy and not.
Starting with the tech savvy people,
this group typically involve entrepreneurs
and small business owners
who are keen to understand new technology.
They're less focused on the bottom line,
but rather staying ahead of the trends,
and now what about those non tech savvy people?
Well, they might usually include older management.
They're the individuals who are less ready for change
or innovative ideas.
These individuals prefer to focus
on delivering excellent service
to improve their bottom line rather than marketing.
Having identified these two groups,
we might now be wondering,
how will this help our relationship with these customers?
Well, segmenting these two groups
means we can better understand
how to communicate with each individual,
bringing the information they care about
to the forefront of our interaction.
So now third on the agenda is to create our persona.
Continuing with the before website design example,
having gone through the first two steps,
combining insight with the information gained
from interviewing customers and collecting survey data.
We've come up with a following buyer persona
for supervisor Sam, as an example,
as an overview, Sam supervisors a team of 10
at a recruiting firm.
He completed his undergraduate degree in management in 2005,
in terms of his demographics, he's male, 38 years old.
Maintains an annual income of $74,000.
Lives in Sydney with his dog, Ollie, two kids
and white picket fence.
His challenges or pain points are keeping staff
and standing out amongst the competition.
His biggest fear is being let go
or losing competent customers and advisors to a competitor.
His goals or motivators
are to work for one of the best
recruitment firms in Australia.
Find top quality candidates for his clients
and achieve a salary of over a $100,000.
His hobbies include outdoor activities like hiking, cycling,
taking holidays with his wife
and spending time with his children whenever he can.
As I'm sure you can see the following format
filters the key personality traits of this individual,
painting a clear picture
about what this individual wants.
However, the information that you've placed into the profile
must relate to the product or service that you're providing.
So there you go,
you've now got the first steps
to building your buyer, persona under your belt.
You now well on way to understanding the challenges
your customers face, how they make decisions
and importantly, how you can better serve them
by changing the way you communicate forever.
So if you found this video helpful,
feel free to share it with someone you know,
that needs a hand with creating buyer personas.
You can also subscribe to our blog
or you'll find a bunch more tools, tips and templates
to help you find sell and keep your people
just like Neighbourhood does.
So that's it from me, happy marketing.
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