Persona Development Services

Search engines change. Your customers change. So how do you make business decisions when the goalposts move? With a little help from buyer persona development, expert consultants empower you to understand your target audience like never before. By creating buyer personas, you can tailor your products and services to meet the specific needs of your ideal customer.

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Buyer Persona Development: A Journey to ROI

Buyer persona development is a key element in any high-quality marketing strategy. Based on careful research and data-driven insights, this approach gives you the chance to separate your large, disparate target audience into manageable personalities you can market to more effectively. Creating buyer personas allows you to understand your ideal customer on a deeper level, enhancing your marketing efforts and driving better results.

Chances are, your target audience is spread across the country (or maybe even the world). To develop blog content, social media posts and other marketing collateral that caters to their unique experiences, you can break this audience down into buyer personas and market to each group a little differently. There are no hard and fast rules for how you separate these buyer personas; it all depends on your company’s goals and the products or services you offer.

Flip through our example personas:

For example, say some of your target audience lives in rural areas while other members are happier in the middle of a bustling city. Because of their locations, these people have different needs and expectations for your brand, which means you can’t treat them all the same — so, in this case, you might create one customer persona called ‘Metropolitan Molly’ and another named ‘Rural Russell.’ By developing these personas, you can tailor your products and services to match the specific needs of each group.

However, in the real world, persona development is rarely based on a single differentiator. To effectively create and consistently target these buyer personas, you need to juggle all kinds of variables — which is why many companies turn to a persona development partner to help create marketing collateral capable of delighting any customer. A well-crafted buyer persona template can simplify this process, enabling you to capture important details like job title, customer base and more.

Call the Experts in Buyer Persona Development

At Brafton, we follow a 6-step process of persona development that allows us to deliver and analyse the precise buyer data you need, ultimately creating fully-fledged personas informed by a variety of differentiators.

Each persona template acts as a blueprint for honing your messaging, nurturing prospect intent and supporting the overall customer experience. With a deeper understanding of your prospects, you can target your marketing efforts and optimise your content strategy with greater success.

Throughout this journey, you uncover insights into your audience, including:

Which prospects have the highest commercial value.
How best to reach your buyers and on which platforms.
Who is an influencer, and who is a decision-maker.
Which stage in the buyer funnel to engage prospects.
Campaign tactics prospects will be most receptive to.
The strategies that convert site visitors into buyers.

Our team becomes an extension of your sales team, working together to identify the ideal customer and tailor your marketing efforts accordingly.

Our Process

We don’t cut corners when we create your buyer personas. Our process goes like this:

To build out your brand personas, we start with a discovery call that illuminates all of the pain points you currently face, the goals you intend to achieve and how your customer personas are going to be used in your marketing strategy. We delve into your products and services to understand how they meet the needs of your target audience.

Your dedicated consultant unearths new opportunities for you to achieve higher ROI on each conversion and maps specific content types back to defined buyer personas. By creating buyer personas tailored to your ideal customer, we ensure your marketing efforts are aligned with your business objectives.

We speak with members of your organisation and several of your existing clients to develop a stronger sense of what makes a buyer come to your brand and what makes them tick. This includes understanding their job titles, responsibilities and how your products or services fit into their daily operations.

By collecting and developing targeted questions from your team and customers, we customise a strategy to dive deep into current prospect metrics, lead tracking systems and demographic information. This helps us create buyer persona examples that are accurate and effective.

You can coordinate and schedule meetings at your convenience based on the stakeholders involved on your side. Your consultant and support team will gather critical information from your top marketing executives, which will shape the scope of persona development to ensure all benchmarks are agreed upon. User interviews can also reveal insights into the customer perspective and help refine your buyer persona template.

We review all collateral, interviews and findings and compare them to our own research for a comprehensive understanding of all the qualitative and quantitative data. From there, we begin the formal stages of conceptualisation and journey mapping.

Your consultant will partner with Brafton creatives to craft 5 specific buyer personas that are human — not just vague sketches of buyers on paper. These buyer persona profiles will include detailed information about your ideal customer, including their needs, preferences and how they interact with your products and services.

Each persona has an intended goal. These goals can range from brand recognition to overall customer experience, but in the end, they all amount to one thing: helping you achieve greater ROI. By focusing on your ideal customer, we tailor your marketing sales strategies to meet their specific needs.

Some of your site visitors may only be seeking information by exploring your social media posts or browsing your blog. Others may be looking to purchase from you at that exact moment. To distinguish between these unique types of visitors, we create buyer personas that clearly outline who your true buyers are — getting as close to the real people, behaviours and scenarios as we possibly can. This includes considering factors like product development and how your offerings align with customer needs.

Every content marketing asset should subsequently aim to serve a specific user intent — that’s how you drive ROI. By integrating personas and marketing strategies, you ensure that your content resonates with your target audience.

Our design department collates and curates the visual representation of your core buyer personas. We develop a polished, finalised deliverable complete with the full branding components of your company.

With logos, custom images, character illustrations and formatted demographic information neatly designed for easy consumption, you can start targeting your personas from day 1. These buyer persona examples serve as a guide for your entire team, including your sales team, to understand and engage with your ideal customer.

If your target audience changes, you can use your persona template to develop new customer personas. Sharing these documents with other members of your sales and marketing teams enables your organisation to stay on message at all times, ensuring consistency in your marketing sales approach.

GET HELP WITH PERSONAS

Example Buyer Persona

John Davidson, VP, Professional Services – Advisor Technology Solutions

Age: 35+

Salary: $110K +

Experience: 10+ years in IT experience, experience in advisory industry a plus.

What pain points would a strong campaign address for this decision-maker?

Motivations:

35%: Needs a partner that is reliable and available, an extension of his team and one that reflects well on his organisation.

35%: Looking for a partner that can integrate seamlessly with his team. On-the-ground synergy is important.

30%: Looking for a partner that will facilitate excellent client-side service toward his organisation’s commercial goals and can make the on-the-ground team’s client-side interfaces as smooth and efficient as possible.

Stages of the Buyer Funnel

Draw a straight line from buyer persona development to conversion. That’s how we define success, and it’s how we guide our content strategy and marketing programmes. Creating buyer persona business strategies that align with each stage of the buyer funnel ensures maximum impact.

Each potential customer plays a specific role in your lead generation efforts. Creating the right content and serving it to them at the right moment can shorten sales processes and increase micro and macro conversions.

Targeting intent-rich prospects starts with understanding each stage of the buyer funnel.

Awareness

Your customers are out there waiting to see great content. At this stage, however, they’re being introduced to your brand. They may have landed on your site organically or heard great things about your organisation. By creating buyer persona profiles, you can tailor your content to capture their attention.

Interest

Prospects may browse your site more closely, seeking out data, opinions, education, insights and answers to some of their pain points. They may start to develop opinions about your brand. Understanding your buyer personas at this stage helps you provide the information they seek.

Consideration

You may now be in competition with other companies that provide similar services. Site visitors are gathering as much information as they can to share with their executives. They’re seeking product demos, price comparisons and any metrics that can help paint you in the best light. By focusing on your ideal customer and their needs, you can differentiate your products and services.

Decision

At this stage, your prospects have their wallets open and are moments away from becoming buyers. They need absolute confidence in your services, buy-in from their internal stakeholders and a flexible contractual framework that suits their long-term needs. Your sales team can leverage the buyer persona template to address any final concerns.

Looking at these different types of buyers and the stages at which they are in sets the tone for your content marketing campaigns. Your custom-developed buyer personas are specifically designed to extract maximum value out of each stage of the funnel. By aligning your marketing sales efforts with the buyer’s journey, you enhance your chances of conversion.

Consulting that Converts

By creating buyer personas, you can target your audience with personalised content, which doubles email open rates and increases sales leads.

But that’s not all you can expect from buyer persona development. Realistically, this is just the first step in a broader marketing strategy — one built on real, valuable data and insights that put your customers at the heart of every decision you make. Remember, a truly memorable customer experience is always omnichannel, which means your new buyer personas can and should support the creation of a more cohesive brand voice across every touchpoint. From blog content creation and social media posts to influencer marketing and after-sales support, a buyer persona acts as your roadmap through customer interactions, helping you navigate expectations, needs and the creation of long-term relationships.

Your customers aren’t the only ones who will appreciate your investment in buyer persona development. Internal teams, too, will feel more supported and informed when interacting with your target audience or providing customer support. The result is a more cohesive approach at every level of your company — all because you took the time to better understand who you’re marketing to. Your sales team, marketing department and product development team can all benefit from the insights gained through buyer persona business strategies.

Perhaps most importantly, buyer persona-driven marketing campaigns tend to be more cost-effective and resource-efficient than other approaches. They reduce lead conversion time and, ultimately, allow you to focus on the right people at the right time. By concentrating on your ideal customer, you optimise your marketing efforts and maximise your ROI.