Skip navigation
Growth Strategies and Growth Marketing

Defining Buyer Personas Sharpens Your Marketing

Kasvustrategiat_ja_kasvumarkkinointi alasivu

Defining buyer personas pays off – they help the entire organisation understand the needs and expectations of your ideal customers. This allows marketing and communication to be targeted more precisely and aligned consistently throughout the entire buyer journey and customer relationship.

Explore the buyer persona workshop: We help you and your customers succeed!

Buyer Personas in a Nutshell

  1. Buyer personas are your company's ideal customers

  2. Buyer personas tell you who to market to and how

  3. Buyer personas are easy to define in a Blink Helsinki workshop

Defining buyer personas is one of the most important first steps in planning successful marketing. The process helps sales, marketing, and customer service understand customers' needs and goals – and target marketing more effectively as a result.

Buyer personas are fictional customer profiles based on real customer data. They give your company an understanding of customers' needs, motivations, and purchasing behaviour.

Ask us more

What Is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a description of your company's ideal customer. It is based on experience and informed assumptions about your typical customer, research data, and behavioural data from existing customers.

A business typically has several buyer personas that matter. Some of them make purchasing decisions independently, while others influence the decision indirectly.

When defining a buyer persona, it is important to find out at least the following:

  • Why and how does the buyer persona become interested in your company?

  • How do you convince the buyer persona to become a lead?

  • How do you nurture the lead into sales-readiness – and into a loyal customer?

It is also essential to identify what barriers to purchasing your buyer personas experience – in other words, why they end up choosing a different solution. Buyer persona definition always aims to identify the messages and everyday pain points connected to the solutions your company offers.

After a sale is made, the customer journey continues with sales and customer service as well as marketing. That is why it is important for sales, marketing, and customer service to collaborate closely when defining buyer personas. 

What Are the Benefits of Defining Buyer Personas?

  • You get to know your target group and customers better
  • You reach the right audience with the right message
  • You boost sales and marketing with a shared goal
  • You keep the common objective clear across the organisation
ostajapersoonat_ovat_yrityksen_tunnistettuja_ideaaliasiakkaita

Buyer Persona Workshop with Blink Helsinki's Experts

What Does Blink's Buyer Persona Workshop Include?

Blink's expert workshop is an agile and effective way to create baseline hypotheses for your most important buyer personas. It incorporates perspectives from customer interactions across different stages of the buying process: marketing, sales, customer service/service delivery, and after-sales.

The workshop identifies – based on your organisation's existing empirical knowledge or research data – the variables that matter for purchasing decisions. The workshop can also be arranged as part of a marketing success plan.

Next Steps: Enriching and Validating Buyer Personas

Buyer personas can also be enriched by studying real customers. The workshop findings are supplemented by researching actual prospects, leads, and customers. The following methods can be used, for example:

  • Focus groups
  • Interviews
  • Participatory observation
  • Probes (cultural probes)

Enrichment is a qualitative phase in which the sample studied is typically relatively small. This allows for an intensive focus on individual people. On the other hand, because the group studied may be small, it does not always represent the entire group. For this reason, verification and refinement – i.e. validation – is still needed.

Validation can be carried out using various types of surveys, for example. In some cases, it is necessary to make the survey a recurring, automated nurture model.

Interested in a buyer persona workshop? Get in touch – let's plan the right package for your company!

Buyer Persona Profile – Defining the Ideal Customer

Once buyer personas have been defined in the workshop, concise ideal customer profiles are compiled from the findings. Each buyer persona gets its own profile that addresses the same questions and objectives. What information about ideal customers is worth including in a buyer persona profile depends greatly on the company's operations and the products or services being sold. The profile can include, for example:

  • Demographic information
  • Work-related information
  • Company information
  • Goals and challenges
  • Primary objective
  • Value proposition that resonates with the buyer persona

Whether it is a B2B or B2C customer, every profile should be approached as a person – not as an employee or a company. When you market from human to human, you can connect with the buyer persona's problems, challenges, and goals on a concrete level – we all make our final decisions based on emotion.

Request a proposal

Buyer Persona Definition Supports Content Planning

If you don't know who you're marketing to or why, you squander your opportunity to influence your target audience's purchasing behaviour. Your company website probably features service and product pages, case studies, and other customer-serving content – but do you know how these help purchasing decisions take shape?

The right content is everything. It helps you grow organic search engine visibility and capture the attention of potential customers in paid advertising.

What kind of content should you create for your buyer personas? Find out the following about your buyer personas:

 

  1. Why do visitors come to your company's website?

  2. What are the top 10 search queries that bring visitors to the site?

  3. What publications do your buyer personas follow?

  4. Is all of this aligned with how you communicate with your customers?

Data-Driven Marketing Is Built on Customer Understanding

If you don't know why customers come to your site, you can't create compelling content or effective marketing. Use buyer persona-based analytics and data to identify the probabilities, tendencies, and typical behavioural patterns related to purchasing your products. This way, you always build your communication, marketing, and sales strategies from a customer-centric perspective.

In a data-driven model, you can easily see which content is working – which pages attract traffic or which calls to action (CTAs) convert leads. This enables you to continuously produce better, more customer-centric content that serves your buyer personas.

Buyer Journeys, Goals, and Metrics to Support Buyer Personas

Buyer personas tell you who your ideal customers are. Buyer journeys reveal how these personas move from contacts to prospects and leads, from leads to deals, and on to loyal customers. Without defining buyer journeys, it is difficult to know how customer acquisition works in practice. In addition to buyer personas and buyer journeys, it is also worth defining the related goals and metrics.

Interested in defining buyer personas and buyer journeys? We create a marketing success plan for your company using our four-stage Gameplan process. Gameplan is carried out over several workshop sessions that – in addition to buyer persona and buyer journey definition – also include defining brand objectives and success metrics.

Request a proposal

Explore Our Other Growth Marketing Services!

  • Buyer journeys

    Buyer journeys

    Defining buyer's journeys help a company to understand how customers move through the purchase process from start to finish.
  • Success plan

    Success plan

    A success plan is a marketing and sales plan based on your business growth strategy that will help you achieve your goals.
    Read more
  • Content strategy

    Content strategy

    A marketing content strategy is a plan for how a company will create, publish and distribute content.
    Read more
  • Inbound marketing

    Inbound marketing

    With inbound marketing, you build a data-driven marketing model for your business that brings potential customers to your website, converts visitor traffic into leads, nurtures leads into sales, and nurtures deals into loyal customers.
    Read more
  • Key metrics and key analytics

    Key metrics and key analytics

    With the right metrics, your company can monitor the effectiveness of your marketing and make the necessary changes.
    Read more
Aiming for success?

Get in touch or book a time in my calendar!

Antti Tolonen Managing Director antti@blinkhelsinki.fi +358 50 348 0347