When it comes to marketing and sales strategies, having a clear understanding of your target audience is key. Knowing who you’re trying to reach can help you hone your messaging and create content that leaves a lasting impression. One of the best tools to gain a better understanding of a specific target audience is the buyer persona.
Buyer personas are created through market research and precise data analysis. However, in order to create an effective buyer persona, it’s necessary to delegate the task to the right people in your company. So who should be involved in creating your buyer personas?
In this article, we’ll discuss the importance of involving multiple parties in buyer persona development and help you understand who should be included in this process.
What is a Buyer Persona in Digital Marketing?
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of an ideal customer for a specific business.
The buyer persona is based on market research and real data about existing customers. The main purpose of creating buyer personas is to gain a better understanding of the needs, goals, and behaviors of customers so that marketing efforts can be more focused and personalized.
Buyer personas can be based on a variety of demographic, psychographic, and behavioral information, such as age, gender, interests, income, habits, hobbies, education level, job title, buying preferences, and geographic location.
They are valuable to any organization that sells products or services to customers, as they help to ensure that the right messages are being developed and sent to the right individuals.
In digital marketing especially, buyer personas are a valuable tool because they allow businesses to take a few steps in the shoes of their customers, and use that knowledge for future marketing and sales outreach.
Key Takeaways
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional portrayal of the average target customer. Creating a buyer persona helps businesses identify more optimal marketing and sales strategies;
The most important teams to create the buyer persona should include the marketing team, the sales team, the product design team, and the customer experience team;
Obtaining the data for your buyer persona might involve some difficulties. Leveraging automatically-collected data through website analytics is a common approach to filling in the gaps.
Who Should Create Your Buyer Persona?
Creating a buyer persona is an essential part of developing a successful marketing or sales strategy. For this reason, it’s important to ensure that the team creating your buyer persona is well-versed in customer research, analytics, and business strategy.
In an ideal scenario, every customer-facing employee within a company would be able to offer their input and help to develop the buyer persona. However, in practice, having at least one representative from each department to offer their input is a good start.
An effective buyer persona development team should include a marketer, salesperson, and customer service expert to provide insight into various customer segments.
Naturally, other parties that have direct or indirect contact with the customers can offer their input as well. Depending on the size of your company or organization, it may also be beneficial to include representatives from product, engineering, and other departments that have a direct impact on the overall customer experience.
Leveraging your team’s collective knowledge allows you to create a buyer persona that truly reflects your customer base.
How Do Different Team Members Contribute to the Buyer Persona?
If you need a buyer persona to accurately reflect the target customer, a range of team members should contribute to the process. Here are the main ways in which different team members may contribute.
Marketers
It’s a good idea to include marketers in the process as they can provide consumer insights and analytics, helping to understand what customers want from a product or service. Marketers also have a good understanding of the customer journey which is very important to consider while creating an accurate buyer persona profile.
Designers
Designers can be instrumental in creating a visual representation of the ideal product for a specific buyer persona, which can help to define the persona further. In addition to visualizing the product or service, designers can help to visualize the buyer themselves and help to identify key features about them.
Sales teams
Sales teams can also provide valuable insight into customer behaviors, needs, and values. The customer service representatives are very close to the sales as far as they typically have the most knowledge of the customer experience. Thus you will be able to create a specific type of prospect you may expect.
Product teams
Product teams can provide insights into product features and benefits that appeal to the target customers. It’s invaluable to include product designers in the buyer persona creation process to avoid having to redesign certain features or the whole product idea.
Other departments
Additionally, involving other departments, such as finance and operations, can provide valuable insights that may impact your marketing and sales efforts. Potentially, they can offer valuable perspectives into buyer behavior and even help to produce multiple personas for your business.
What Is Buyer Persona Brainstorming?
Brainstorming refers to the rapid presentation of ideas related to a specific topic. When it comes to buyer persona development, brainstorming can often be helpful.
In particular, this type of idea creation and planning is a good way to bring together multiple teams and task them with different areas of work. For example, marketers, sales personnel, and customer service agents can all come together and brainstorm on what the ideal buyer persona might be.
Why buyer persona brainstorming is needed?
Brainstorming allows all members of your team to share their perspectives and uncover unique approaches to buyer persona creation and utilization that you may have previously missed. The importance of this technique lies in the fact that it facilitates teamwork in an organization.
It is rarely easy to leverage the knowledge of multiple departments at the same time. Brainstorming helps to surpass the usual barriers between professionals in different fields and lets them share their points of view without expecting perfection.
Moreover, brainstorming can enhance content marketing by putting out new and creative content ideas. The benefits of having an accurate buyer persona are immense for a business’s overall marketing strategy.
Which Parts of Your Organization Can Benefit from Buyer Personas?
We’ve covered how key team members in your organization can contribute to the development of a unique buyer persona, but what about the parts of your organization that benefit from it the most?
As it turns out, many of the same teams responsible for a successful buyer persona are also the ones that benefit from it in the end.
In particular, the following parts of an organization can benefit from a well-researched buyer persona: the marketing team, the sales team, the product teams, the customer support teams, and the customer success teams.
Marketing & Sales teams
For marketing and sales teams, buyer personas can provide insights into the various types of customers and their primary needs, helping them to create more engaging marketing and sales campaigns. A buyer persona can be highly useful for inbound marketing as far as it often requires a good understanding of the target audience.
Additionally, knowing the average age of your target audience can help the marketing and sales teams pick between the traditional approach and older prospects. Usually, a newer marketing approach leverages current trends for a younger audience.
Product teams
Product teams can use buyer personas to develop a better understanding of what customers truly want and need, allowing them to develop products and features that are more effective at meeting those needs. This type of data is typically more difficult to obtain, but it is almost certainly worth the effort.
Getting the right understanding of a product helps companies save resources on a redesign. Also, it facilitates capturing a target market faster than competitors and keeping up with trends.
Customer support teams
Customer support teams can use buyer personas to anticipate client’s needs and provide more effective tailored support. Similarly, customer success teams can use buyer personas to design new programs that capture existing product users and foster greater loyalty among them, improving the bottom line.
Using a buyer persona template can provide insights into the most important elements of a buyer persona for support teams. There are many free customizable templates on platforms such as Canva that anybody can try.
What Is the Role of “Back Office” Teams in Creating Buyer Personas?
When it comes to creating buyer personas, many businesses tend to focus on the marketing, sales, and customer service teams. However, the work of “back office” teams can be just as important to the process.
What are “back office” teams?
Essentially, “back office” teams are the ones that work behind the scenes to keep business running smoothly. They might include IT, finance, operations, and HR departments. Even if they are not in direct contact with the customers, their work can greatly impact the buyer persona creation process.
For example, let’s say that you’re creating a buyer persona for a new product that your business is launching. Your marketing team might be responsible for conducting customer surveys and interviews to gather data about your target audience.
However, the collected data needs to be analyzed before using them and creating an accurate buyer persona. That’s where your back-office teams come in.
How do “back office” teams help create a buyer persona?
Your IT team, for instance, might be responsible for the customers’ relationship management (CRM) system. They help to ensure that the data you’re collecting is organized in a way that makes sense and is easy to work with.
Meanwhile, your finance team can provide insights into customer purchasing behavior based on their analysis of financial data.
Moreover, your operations team can play a crucial role in helping you identify any pain points or challenges that customers might be facing in their interactions with your business. By working closely with your customer service team, they can help you uncover any inefficiencies or bottlenecks that might be preventing customers from having a positive experience with your brand.
Overall, the work of “back office” teams is invaluable when it comes to creating accurate and effective buyer personas.
Who Should Develop Your B2B Buyer Persona?
Creating an effective B2B buyer persona involves a collaborative effort between different teams within a company. In addition to internal teams, it can also be beneficial to incorporate feedback from current customers, as they are the ones who have already decided to purchase your product or service.
In the case of a B2B buyer persona, those current customers will be other businesses whom you’ve serviced in the past, or who continue to support your business.
In addition to the previously mentioned benefits of incorporating marketing and sales teams into the development of the buyer persona, product development teams can be valuable in creating a B2B buyer persona. They can provide insights into the features and benefits that other businesses are looking for in a product or service.
It’s always good to include a wide range of perspectives. Your B2B buyer persona ought to accurately reflect the needs, desires, and pain points of the businesses you target.
How to get data for Buyer Personas?
Delegating the right tasks to the right team members is only one part of the buyer persona development process. Perhaps the most important component of persona creation is data collection. Small businesses can make use of the buyer persona just as well as their larger counterparts, but it may be more difficult for them to obtain the necessary data.
Nowadays, data collection became easier and accessible for all types of businesses. Yet, there are a few key tips to keep in mind regarding the best ways to collect data for your target market.
1. Leverage current customers
Existing customers are a well of information that tells you a lot about potential future customers as well. It’s likely that if your products or services have not changed dramatically, future customers will react in similar ways.
Identifying pain points by conducting interviews, and collecting customer feedback, are both great ways to learn more about your target audience. This knowledge is later useful in the creation of your new buyer persona.
2. Use available data
Some pieces of data will already be available to you. These are commonly found through website analytics and lead generation forms that definitely do their job.
Popular website analytics tools such as Google Analytics can help you access this type of data. Collecting and analyzing them is everything you need to determine exactly who are you selling to.
3. Contact persons of interest
Reaching out to persons of interest might be a good strategy for you if there is no data available or you don’t have any customers yet. This person can be anyone who might have insights to share regarding your target audience.
Your professional network, previous business partners, current colleagues, and even strangers on LinkedIn could help your cause. Knowing the right questions is key in order to incorporate this data into your future buyer persona effectively.
The Bottom Line
A buyer persona can be a powerful tool to gain a better understanding of your target market. It is a representation of the most common characteristics that the members of your target audience share. In developing your own buyer persona, leveraging different sources of data and methods of analysis can be useful.
You’ve learned what teams are the most crucial in buyer persona development, what teams benefit the most from buyer personas, and how to obtain valuable customer data. With all this valuable information, it’s up to you now to determine who might be the best teams or individuals to work on your buyer persona and how this persona can help to improve current marketing and sales strategies.
