Importance of Buyer Personas: Other Side of the Glass Door
3 min read
When I think of customers, it reminds me of glass doors.
Glass doors allow you to see through but hide the complete picture. Similar to what your assumption of your buyers does to you. Your perception of your buyer will enable you to get the basic demographics, like their age, gender, interests, hobbies, etc. You may also know their likes and dislikes.
Is this information valuable? Does it improve your marketing strategy by even a single percent?
When it comes to building buyer personas, many marketers stand outside the glass door and create a persona on whatever blurry picture they can get. I wouldn’t even call it a persona but just a two-dimensional image. How many of us try to open the glass door and get the actual picture?
Well, the marketers who’ve already opened the glass door are the ones whose marketing strategies are pure gold! And it is the process of identifying a buyer persona that has helped them be a gold-digger.
If you don’t have a clear answer to the following question, you will not only struggle to draw impressive results, but you will also lose your existing clients. The question is simple-
Do you know precisely who your buyer is?
When I say ‘precisely’ here, I am not referring to the age, gender, height, weight, or the color of their hair. I am indicating towards more intensive elements-
The answers to these questions aren’t easy to obtain, but they are the ones that will add value to your customer persona. These answers will help you create a perfect buyer persona. Plus, they will reinforce the importance of buyer personas.
A perfect buyer persona adds life to your marketing. Where ‘targeted audience’ remains an inanimate object, buyer personas humanize your audience. The audience gets a face. It personifies your ‘ideal market.’ This personification helps you be in the audience’s shoes and feel their pain points, listen to them, understand them as a human, and move beyond short-term sales and towards building a long-term relationship.
It allows you to convey a more tailored message, minimize advertising waste and discover obstacles that hold back customers.
We at Convirza can help you listen to your customer’s phone calls. And because we want to make your life easy, we also score your inbound calls to qualify them as marketing or sales leads.
The missing link here is that most marketers add the visible physical traits to a persona, mostly because they’re easy to acquire, and in the process ignore the more valuable, unseen emotional factors that drive the buying decision. Instead of mapping a customer journey, teams commit themselves to jot down believable demographics.
Does the age and gender of a buyer affect his or her buying decision? If yes, decide a range. I am not against demographics. I am against wasting valuable resources and time over collecting demographics. They will not help you change your product-centric marketing to customer-centric marketing.
That brings me to my next point- Most of our marketing revolves around analytical aspects like our tool’s unique features, faster performance, better results but very few marketing approaches are about the buyer’s sensitive touchpoints, or about emotionally seducing a buying decision.
There always exists a glass door between you and your buyers. Most marketers try to only look through the glass door, but very few take efforts to open the door and see the complete picture of their buyers. This picture is nothing but a perfect buyer persona. Marketers who strive to get the clear image know the importance of buyer personas.
Once you establish your persona, angle everything about your marketing toward your buyer avatar. Customer personas must be at the heart of your marketing strategy.
In our next blog spot, we will talk about which are the right doors to knock, and what is the proper method to knock on the glass door. Grab your free copy of buyer persona templates without fail. Until then, happy marketing to you!
Published on: Jul 9, 2018
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[…] have been talking about buyer personas this month. In the last blog, I discussed an analogy where we spoke about a glass door between us marketers and our buyers. This […]