Buyer Personas & Buyer Journey
Buyer personas and the buyer journey help you to make better targeted and more effective marketing
Buyer personas are the cornerstone of customer-oriented inbound marketing. They are fictional representations of your company’s ideal customers based on data and research. After you have identified your buyer persona, it is easier for you to solve their problems and make more efficient targeted marketing and offer the right content to different target groups in the right place and at the right time.
Buyer personas do not only tell you who your customers are, they also dive deeper into the needs, ideas, motivations, challenges, behaviour and factors affecting the purchase decision of each target group.
What makes your customers excited or keeps them awake at night? Where do they look for information and how? Efficient and targeted content, messages and media plans are based on our understanding of the buyer persona.
Buyer personas are always unique, tailored to each company and its services. How many buyer personas you should have will vary depending on the company, but the ideal number is somewhere between 3 and 5. Quru is very experienced in creating tailored buyer personas using various sources of data and research and client workshops.
Identifying the customer’s buyer journey helps to improve the performance of your entire organisation
In addition to buyer personas, buyer journeys (or customer journeys) are the second key element of inbound marketing. These describe the customer’s journey towards the decision to buy a product or service.
The buyer persona-specific buyer journey will help you to understand in more depth what your buyer persona wants to hear at different stages of the journey and what information will be useful for that buyer persona. This allows you to serve your customer more effectively while recognising the weaknesses and strengths of the customer experience. The entire marketing process should be built to support the buyer persona’s decision making.
Buyer journeys can be presented as a diagram by acknowledging important touchpoints along those journeys. This means joining together sales, marketing and customer service as one seamless process. As a result, determining buyer journeys not only helps you develop your marketing but your entire organisation as well. The mapped out journeys can be used, for example, for designing marketing and sales activities and marketing automation.
The main stages of the buyer journey:
- Awareness: the customer is aware of his or her needs or challenges. This may have been brought about by a situation in their everyday life or thought-provoking or memorable content offered at the right time.
- Consideration: at the consideration stage, the customer is researching the options that are available for encountering the challenge or meeting the need.
- Decision: the client has researched the options and makes a decision.
See also marketing automation and inbound marketing.