Any business’ success depends on having a clear grasp of its ideal client or user. Thus, the best way to satisfy the needs of your customer is by designing products, services, and marketing with an awareness of their wants, drives, and objectives. A buyer persona helps to achieve all of these goals in different and unique ways.
With that in mind, let’s have a closer look at the advantages of crafting a buyer persona. In this article, we explain how you can curate a buyer persona story to serve your unique content marketing, inbound marketing, or related business goals.
What Is a Buyer Persona Story?
Curating a buyer persona story is a great method to get a deeper understanding of who your customers are, how they think, and how to engage them most effectively. But what is a buyer persona story?
A buyer persona story is a detailed illustration of a potential customer, created through market research and data analysis.
Since this tool makes use of market research, it often includes demographic information such as age, income, and education level, as well as, psychographic information such as lifestyle, interests, and customer concerns.
Buyer persona stories help you gain a better understanding of the motivations and decisions of your customers. This, in turn, enables you to create a marketing and sales strategy that will be successful in converting prospects into loyal customers.
Key Takeaways
A buyer persona story is a visualization of a fictional customer and how they are likely to behave when interacting with a company’s marketing content, products, or services, based on research and data analysis.
Answering various questions on the ways the typical customer would behave provides insights into the future outcomes of marketing and sales campaigns;
The key elements of a buyer persona generally include the customer pain points, their media preferences, goals, motivations, as well as demographic data such as age, income, and marital status.
How Do You Create a Buyer Persona Story?
There is more than one way to develop a buyer persona. If you’ve already had the chance to do some research, you’ve probably noticed countless buyer persona templates that make use of different approaches.
A buyer persona story is one of the most effective ways to gain a better understanding of the goals which drive your customers. Here are the main points you should consider while creating your buyer persona story from scratch.
1. Define the main character
To develop an effective buyer persona story, the main character – your average customer must be hashed out first. Collect user data that describes different customer characteristics, so that you can determine the age, gender, income, location, and shopping habits of your average client. This unique set of features makes up the skeleton of the buyer persona.
2. Name your persona
Once the foundation for the buyer persona story has been set, a name and other fictional features can be given to the persona based on their likely characteristics. This helps the process of personification and story development.
3. Ask the right questions
Lastly, a story can be created by attempting to answer a series of questions about the typical buyer that would make sense based on their unique traits. Some of the following questions are often used in the creation of a buyer persona story:
- What does their average day look like?
- What are their main goals?
- How quickly do they make decisions?
- How are they likely to respond to different scenarios?
- What would be their ideal purchasing experience?
These questions and many others can be used to write up a 200 to 400 words summary about the typical buyer. The story can provide insights into the likely behavior of prospects or existing customers, helping you stay one step ahead with your marketing or sales strategy.
What Are the Key Parts of a Buyer Persona?
To curate an effective buyer persona and buyer persona story, there is a specific set of key elements that you can incorporate to ensure that you ask the right questions about your customers.
Crucial elements are typically the following: customer pain points, customer media preferences, customer goals, and motivations, demographic data about the customers such as age, marital status, education, and a name for your buyer persona.
The mentioned elements can help to deduce how your customer base is likely to respond to different types of marketing and sales strategies. Similarly, pain points are essential for product design and service development. Thus you can ensure that you are not only able to sell to your customers, but also to meet their needs and make them motivated to make repeat purchases.
The Benefits of Buyer Persona Stories
Buyer persona stories provide valuable insight into how customers interact with your company’s products and services. Creating detailed stories about target customers is a great way to gain a better understanding of their buying habits and preferences. It always leads to improved marketing strategies and customer service.
Yet that’s not all – here are some of the main benefits of buyer persona stories.
Improve business scaling
Buyer personas can help companies create content that resonates with their target audience and better aligns their messages and offerings with their customers’ needs. This can result in higher customer engagement, and an influx of many new leads for the sales funnel.
Creating a buyer persona story can provide businesses with crucial insights to effectively grow and acquire new customers by answering key questions.
Help product design
Additionally, buyer persona stories can provide invaluable feedback regarding customer service and product design. You can adapt and improve your products or services by incorporating insights from buyer persona stories.
Depending on the size of your business, you may require different products and services. By using a buyer persona, you can determine the most effective marketing strategy to attract customers.
Boost sales strategies
Creating buyer personas can help your sales team understand the needs and preferences of your target market. By anticipating your prospects’ behaviors, your team can focus on the most relevant features, benefits, and experiences that matter to your customers.
Qualified sales teams who engage with customers based on buyer personas are more likely to drive satisfaction and loyalty, leading to increased sales.
What is a B2B Buyer Persona?
B2B stands for Business to Business, and it represents companies whose customers are other companies. In B2B relations, buyer personas can also come in quite handy. Just like in the development of a B2C buyer persona, data collection, data analysis, and buyer persona story creation are steps that have to be taken to establish a successful partnership.
The market research element in B2B buyer persona development is typically focused on:
- target business actions made in the past;
- target business current and previous partners;
- Target business future goals.
Still, individuals can also be taken into consideration, and data is often collected on key decision-makers such as managers, department leaders, and CEOs.
Buyer persona stories are more difficult to design for B2B companies, as the target market is typically smaller than it is with individual customers. However, the process proves to be beneficial if a business gain a better understanding of the types of companies it is going to partner with or turn into a customer.
Buyer Persona Story Example
To get a better idea of what a buyer persona story may look like for your business, here is a quick and easy example.
Derek is a 27-year-old recent college graduate living in a metropolitan area. He is currently employed as a junior analyst and is looking to upgrade his laptop for business and personal use. He is tech-savvy but also values a good deal on a product. He spends most of his time researching the latest features and specs while comparing prices between different shops.
John also frequents technology forums to gain insights into the latest developments in the space. He has a limited budget but is willing to pay more for a laptop that can meet his needs and has good overall performance.
When we outline key features about the buyer, we can get a better idea of how we should position our brand and product to meet Derek’s and John’s needs.
Now that you have a better idea of what a buyer persona story may look like for your business, open up a notebook and start writing!
Why should you create a negative persona?
Negative personas are fictional representations of the type of people who are unlikely to be interested in your product or service.
While buyer personas are useful for social media, negative personas can be even more potent. You need to understand who is unlikely to be interested in your product to avoid spending money on advertising to people who will never buy from you. In the long run, this will save time and resources.
Some may think that the creation of a negative persona for small companies is redundant, but they are not just for large enterprises. Small businesses can benefit just as much from the elimination of unnecessary traffic and avoiding bad user experience.
Whether you’re a large enterprise or a small business, creating a buyer persona and a negative persona should be an integral part of your marketing strategy.
The Bottom Line
All in all, creating a buyer persona story is a crucial step in crafting a successful content strategy that resonates with your ideal customer. It’s recommended to use the insights gathered from your buyer persona to create content that speaks directly to your target audience.
It’s important to remember that your buyer persona should evolve as your business grows and your brand persona shifts. Incorporating buyer personas into your content creation process is a key component of a successful content strategy, and with the right tools and approach, buyer personas can help you create content that truly connects with your audience!
