At their core, buyer personas represent the dividing lines between different types of customers. They give you cues on which segments are likely to be your best customers and which ones are less desirable. Your personas will reveal what’s most important to certain customer segments – and how that differs from others. Used properly, customer personas can take your knowledge of buyers from vague to valuable. One way to get started is to look at the data you may already have in your database. Are you capturing product purchase history, pages clicked on your website, or similar information? If so, you have evidence about a buyer that helps to build their persona.
Whenever possible, add attributes such as demographics, age, education, marital status, home ownership, number of children, affluence and more. The more detailed you are, the better.
Use that information to segment buyers, rather than lumping everyone into the same box. With customer segmentation, you can target marketing efforts and personalize campaigns that speak directly to your most important customer personas. For example, rather than sending the same demand generation email to everyone in your database, focus on your best customer segments and tailor messaging according to what you know about those personas.
With in-depth customer segmentation, you have a transparent view of your customers’ motivations, attitudes, behaviors, and desired outcomes. Using buyer personas can help shape not only your marketing initiatives – and the overall business – to align with your customer’s needs and best interests in mind. Creating very specific buyer personas can dramatically improve your business results because you understand the motivating factors that influence buying decisions.
Insight into decision criteria, success factors, and perceived barriers enables you to pinpoint what has the most impact on the buyer's choice. Segmentation finds the customer profiles who are most – and least-likely to buy.
