There is no doubt you know and understand the basics of your buyer persona: age range, title or position, location, and so on. But do you know how potential buyers move through your organization’s sales funnel? How do they consume information? What does a typical workday look like for them? What are their professional goals? What are their main challenges and problems? Knowing their demographics is good, but having a deeper understanding of their behavior, habits, and mindset will help you achieve a better return on your investment (ROI).

In this article, we’ll share with you how buyer personas can impact ROI and how you can develop or redefine yours.

First things first, though. Let’s define what a buyer persona is. According to a recent definition on Hubspot:

Buyer personas are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers. They help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) better, and make it easier for you to tailor content to the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of different groups.

How Buyer Personas Can Affect ROI

Buyer personas provide remarkable structure and insight for your campaigns. A detailed buyer persona will help determine where to focus your team’s time, guide product development, and allow for alignment across the organization.  This will result in increased interest on your brand, better qualified leads, and more closed sales.

By knowing and understanding the buyer persona, you and your marketing team can:

• Increase relevancy. When you speak the customer’s language (both figuratively and literally) and address the customer’s needs, you position your products as relevant and worthy of consideration.

• Assure connection. Marketers who understand the buyer's journey through the sales funnel can make sure that their messages get the best possible response at every touch point in the buying cycle.

• Foster strong brand messaging. This humanistic and individualized approach is more likely to draw prospects in for further discussion and communication.

• Improve ROI. Buyer personas enable you to develop cost-effective marketing strategies that are based on how your target customers are most likely to act.  

It is crucial that you, the leaders in your organization, understand the buyer persona. It is even more imperative that your staff members master the buyer persona as they embark on any marketing strategy. Achieving this harmony puts everyone in the company on the same page with respect to messaging and communications.

Developing Your Buyer Persona

Buyer personas are created through research, surveys, and interviews of your target audience. That includes a mix of customers, prospects, and those outside of your contact database who might align with your target audience. The purpose is to uncover the motivations and goals that drive buying behavior.

Here are some practical methods for gathering the information you need to develop personas:

• Interview customers, either in person or over the phone, to discover what they like about your product or service.

• Look through your contacts database to uncover trends about how certain leads or customers find and consume your content.

• When creating forms to use on your website, use form fields that capture important persona information. (For example, if your personas vary based on company size, ask each lead for information about company size on your forms.)

• Take into consideration your sales team's feedback on the leads that generate the most interaction. What types of sales cycles does your sales team work with? What generalizations can they make about the different types of customers you serve best?

Try to determine the individual goals and responsibilities for the personas you have identified. Who do they report to? What are their biggest challenges? Ask your prospects what resources they use to obtain industry information, and find out if they have a preferred form of contact. When you know what prospects need from you and understand how they want to receive that information, your marketing messages will become more effective. Knowledge is a sure path to improved ROI.

At Xzito, we work with clients to understand their buyer personas, so we are able to develop better strategies to increase web traffic and conversion. Schedule a free one-on-one consultation to find out more about using buyer personas to improve your return on investment.