3 Tough Questions To Ask When Building Your Buyer Persona
You must know your customers before you can market to them. It’s Marketing 101. It’s the foundation of inbound marketing. After all, how are you going to create compelling calls to action if you have no idea what makes your target customer tick? And these days, it seems that every Molly Marketer is on board with creating buyer personas. To know your customers is to sell to them. But how deep into your customer psyche do you go? To really know your customers is to convert them into evangelists for your business.
You’ve met those people, the Starbucks fanatics that have the cup practically glued into their palm at all times. They’ll tell you why a barista writes your name on a cup. They know all about the roasting process and the charitable work that the coffee giant does. Or the big box superstore fans who just won’t shop anywhere else. How special could those big box stores be? According to some die-hard fans, other retailers just won’t do. So how do these companies attract people who drip loyalty?
The truth is, any marketer can ask the easy questions. They can pinpoint demographics like age, education level, and income. But what about the hard questions? If you can ask those, get to the answers, and build a marketing campaign around that persona, then you might have a chance of creating more than a few evangelists for your brand.
Three Questions To Get To the Heart of Your Target Persona
1. What Need Does the Persona Have That our Product/ Service is Not Solving?
Your product cannot cater to every individual's needs, nor should it try to. However, it is crucial to have a solid understanding of what your product lacks in terms of meeting your customers' requirements. Armed with this knowledge, you can either directly address these limitations in your messaging or use your messaging to persuade your customers why they should still choose your brand.
2. What Other Products/Services are out There That May Meet Their Needs Better Than Ours?
Understanding your competition is crucial in today's market, and while you may have a comprehensive list of your competitors' features and benefits, have you truly explored their products from a customer's perspective? For example, why would a customer go to Caribou Coffee over Starbucks? What’s the draw? Is it because they feel cozier there? Or do they have better prices? You need to know what your customers are really looking for and why they go where they go to get it.
3. Do They Think With Their Heart or Their Head?
You know that customers make product decisions regularly. But different personas come to the same conclusion differently. For example, according to the Myers Briggs Foundation, a person who has a Feeling preference in their personality type makes decisions based on weighing what people care about, values, and what will maintain harmony. A person with the Thinking preference makes decisions based on objective principles and impersonal facts. These two personality types would need vastly different communication from your marketing team. You need to develop a marketing program that addresses all the ways your target personas make decisions.
Creating a buyer persona is a process that requires dedication, innovation, and collaboration. Involving your sales team and conducting thorough data analysis on your target market can greatly contribute to its success. However, it is essential to go beyond basic demographics if we truly want to understand our customers and provide them with products and services that genuinely fulfill their needs. By deeply exploring their mindset, we can ensure that our offerings resonate with them on a profound level.
