The buyer persona greatly facilitates business growth by allowing you to develop a representation of an ideal customer. Without guidelines for creating a buyer persona, we can make critical errors that compromise desired effects and harm your business. By drawing conclusions too hastily, your company can veer off track and adopt a tone that does not correspond to its mission. Below are five mistakes to avoid when creating a buyer persona.
Unilateral Research and Data Collection
Before a company embarks on the development of typical buyer profiles, data must first be collected. This takes time and effort and only works if you involve multiple channels. Beginners are often tempted to opt for ease by simply taking into account information from Web analytics and avoiding any direct exchange with consumers. Others use samples that are too small or interview only a handful of people, and they will then base their profiles on this limited data. To create good buyer personas, however, you have to sweep as widely as possible.
Unnecessary Group Analysis Through Average Values
Collecting as much data as possible is important, but one cannot be strongly influenced by statistical surveys. The buyer personas must correspond to real profiles and not lead to a grouping of average values. If you only calculate average values and create different profiles from them, your work will ultimately only look like a group analysis.
Creative Constitution of Buyer Personas
If it is not advisable to focus too much on average values, in turn, you should not be carried away by too much creativity. It quickly happens that we get lost in the creation of profiles by developing stories that no longer have any relation to the initial information. Always keep tangible information as a basis for persona creation. Otherwise, the resulting profile may cause results that contradict your initial goal. Veering off track because of a ‘creative’ buyer persona can be fatal to your business. Marketing will completely miss reaching interested parties, and the profile created will have nothing in common with the true, targeted buyer.
Superficial Profiles
In business, it can be difficult to devote a lot of time to creating buyers’ personas since it only indirectly contributes to an increase in revenue. Typical buyer profiles are then designed quickly and ultimately contain little usable information. However, a buyer persona is only a useful tool if the profile has great informative value. If the profile remains superficial, it becomes difficult to adapt its marketing precisely, and all advantages that a good persona offers are lost.
Too Many or Too Few Buyer Personas
Often, we want to avoid forgetting buyer types and therefore position ourselves as widely as possible. However, this does not allow you to develop a detailed marketing strategy. It is even the opposite: nobody feels concerned in the end.
Conversely, if you have created too few profiles, you run the risk of excluding potential buyers. As a result, the marketing strategy is then too specific, which means limited clientele. However, note that it is generally preferable to start small, with maybe three personas, then develop new ones as you have the capacity.
Buyer Personas in Practice
Once profiles are created, what happens next? Obviously, buyer personas should not be solely used: they are a tool for developing a customer-oriented marketing strategy. The buyer persona can almost be considered as a direct interlocutor when developing this strategy. Marketing measures must then focus on the person represented and persuade or convince them to buy. When developing your strategy, you must always ask yourself the question: what is the current situation of the buyer persona? How can we encourage this customer to take advantage of our offer? With these considerations in mind, it is easier to give the right impetus. This gets straight to the point and avoids overloading interested people with unnecessary information.
The way to address your target demographic is also more easily defined with quality buyer personas. If you have a tangible (albeit imaginary) person in mind, it is easy to set the right tone, and messages are better adapted. As a result, all the marketing measures benefit.
With buyer personas, you can easily tailor your advertising efforts, marketing strategies, and content creation to specific types of buyers. By having a specific example of people in mind, your business’s overall strategy is much better optimized.
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