When it comes to addressing your customer and audience, knowing who they are and where they come from are two of the most fundamental musts before attempting to reach out. Let’s refer to the customers’ “who” as their “buyer persona” and their “where they come from” as their “buyer journey.”
Allow me to define both of these terms:
Buyer Persona: It’s exactly that, the person and personality of your target customer. HubSpot defines it as something that “helps an inbound marketer visualize the ideal prospect, their behavior, demographic profile, and psychographic information.” Setting these terms allows for marketers to continue working toward reaching a specific audience. Having the criteria of the target customer clearly laid out helps to prevent from any inadvertent deviation and to keep a campaign on track.
Buyer Journey: The buyer journey consists of the steps through which a prospective buyer goes when in need of a product or service. First is awareness that there is an issue for which they need something or someone to fix it. Next is consideration of what product or service might suit that need best. The last step is decision time where the consumer chooses the best fit for them.
Now that we’ve established some vocabulary, let’s talk about why these two things are so necessary in any inbound campaign.
Establishing a buyer persona lets you create a vision for what you want to reach. As aforementioned, it helps to prevent deviation and to maintain a constant attention to the same goal. Figuring out who your desired persona is can get tricky. Fortunately, HubSpot has given us some thoughtful questions to help us get there. Before anything, what’s the role of this person’s life or work? What industry do they come from? On a more personal note, what are some of their goals and challenges? What are some of their pain points that you can help to alleviate? Where do they hang out or gather their information from? What kinds of shopping interests do they have? Answering all of these questions will help you arrive at what kind of person or target customer your buyer persona will be.
Now, knowing how to navigate your buyer through their buyer journey is imperative. You’ve established that persona and gotten them to arrive at your product or service. During that initial awareness stage, whose product is the consumer thinking of? Are you making your own available enough so that it’s the first one to come to mind? In the consideration phase, do you have enough information on your website about your product? Does that information and writing speak directly to the buyer persona? It should. If you’ve spoken to that established persona clearly enough, then the decision stage is cake. They pick you!
In short, establishing a buyer persona will keep your campaign on track and will help to keep the message and its delivery uniform so to fit to the persona’s needs. Making sure that your digital and website information speak clearly to that target customer will unconsciously guide them through the buyer journey. Having a clear message that can be easily understood by your persona is what will lead new customers to your product in the decision stage and thus convert them from leads into actual sales and ROI.
Source: B2C_Business
Why Knowing the Buyer Persona and Journey is Essential for Success
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