Without buyer personas, your customers and prospective customers can fade into obscurity.
Do you know who your customers are? Do you understand what they want and more importantly, what they need?
Powerful buyer personas put a face and a personality on your customers. Without buyer personas, your customers can easily become an anonymous entity to everyone who works with them – from customer service to sales. This disconnect offers little effective interaction with them, limiting vital communications and diluting the outcome which can be a sale lost or a sale gained.
What is a Buyer Persona?
A persona represent your audience via commonalities that include defining traits, habits, preferences, goals, demographics, challenges, and more. When you merge and refine these characteristics you create a fictional character or avatar which represents your ideal customer.
Why are Buyer Personas So Important to Tech Companies?
Tech companies are dependent on recurring sales, so retaining customers is essential for survival, alongside bringing new ones on board. Understanding tech customers means knowing as much as possible about what they need, want, and must have. If a company has multiple audience segments, then creating multiple personas to represent them is best.
The origin of a buyer persona is data. Essentially, the more data you have, the better your buyer persona will be. There are two ways to collect your data.
- Market research which includes data collection from your target audience and customers through surveys, focus groups, interviews, case studies, checklists, and questionnaires.
- Analytics and insights which includes behavioral and non-behavioral data that you collect via analytic tools such as Google Analytics, CRM, HubSpot, and more.
Use data from these sources to develop buyer personas for your tech brand. Once you have created the buyer personas, the next step is to use that information to create focused, engaging content. Communicate with each persona on their preferred channels using the right keywords. Following the details of the buyer persona will guide the creation of content that’s relevant to your audience, focusing on what they want and need most.
Here's an example of a Buyer Persona for Tech.
Name: Darren
Title: Technical Director
Age: 35-45
Relationship: Married with two young children
Lifestyle: Enjoys hiking and social events
Industry: Tech company
Goals: Implement high performance digital tools
Challenges: Legacy systems and old-school thinking
Preference Channel: Industry blogs / LinkedIn
Using Buyer Personas to Create Engaging Content
When you make buyer personas the foundation of all your content marketing efforts, it will enhance your content strategy, improve customer engagement, and deliver impactful messages. You will be able to customize your content to reflect the voice of the customer because you know what your customers want. Without struggling, you can easily craft content that delivers information on topics they want to know more about. Since the buyer persona tells you how your customer chooses to get information, you have the advantage of finding suitable marketing channels to deliver your content to them.
Once you have established engaging content, the next step is to guide customers along their buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey simply means the active research process someone goes through leading up to a purchase. It's a fundamental part of an inbound strategy because it's a framework you can use to understand your buyer's care abouts and provide the information they need to reach their goals.
A Few Buyer Persona Statistics*
HubSpot shares that using marketing personas made websites 2-5 times more effective and easier to use by targeted users.
Thomson Reuter said that companies using buyer personas see an additional 10% increase in leads sent to their sales departments and a 72% reduction in overall lead conversion time.
Curata shares that 63% of marketers create content by their buyer personas.
Google trends for “buyer persona” search term have increased over the past 15 years, showing current interest to be at an all-time high, according to Delve.ai.
Summary
Staying agile and adapting strategies based on ongoing data analysis will help to ensure continuous improvement and sustained success in the fast-paced technology and services sectors. Maintaining fresh, relevant buyer personas is a proven way to better understand customers and provide them with the delight of data-driven tech marketing made possible, in large part, by powerful buyer personas.
Witmer Group invites you to download our comprehensive Buyer Persona Guide which should answer any questions you might have on the topic.