Persona Development Services

Your persona development is the foundation of all of your marketing. It is not a process to shortcut if you want to maximise the return on your investment - ROI.

Search engines change and so do your customers. So how do you make business decisions when the goal posts change? Our experienced persona development consultants empower you to understand your buyers like never before.

Persona Development Services

One of the most effective ways to capture, communicate and use research findings is to develop personas.

Personas are fictional characters which represent key attributes and behaviours of customer segments. They are widely used in digital marketing development but need to be grounded in real user research and customer data to be of value.

Our methodology is designed to ensure that personas are an authentic reflection of customer research and to enable personas to be used as a key tool to measure online behaviour and drive digital development.

Without a solid researched persona – you are marketing in the dark,throwing time and money at the wrong consumers.

Today’s buyer needs more careful consideration than the target markets of old.

Actionable buyer personas reveal insights about your prospects’ decision process — the specific attitudes, concerns and criteria that drive them to choose you, your competitor or the status quo.

When you have insights into what your buyers think about doing business with you, including verbatim quotes from people who have recently made the decision to solve a similar problem, you have the knowledge you need to make your marketing and sales more efficient.

At Best-Digital Marketing, our persona development services will help you improve your positioning and messaging for your content marketing and sales enablement approach so they align with your customer’s expectations.

Your Roadmap To Maximise Your Return On Investment – ROI

At Best-Digital Marketing – we follow a 6-step process of persona development that allows us to communicate, deliver and analyse the precise buyer data you need, ultimately creating fully fledged personas.

These customer personas are blueprints for sharpening your messaging, communicating effectively and nurturing prospects purchase intent.

With a deeper understanding of your prospects, you can target your marketing efforts with greater success.

Throughout this roadmap, you will uncover insights into your audience including:

✅ Which prospects have the highest commercial value?

✅ Who is a decision-maker and who is an influencer.

✅ Which stage in the buyer funnel to engage with prospects?

✅ Campaign tactics prospects will be most receptive to.

✅ How best to reach your buyers and on which platforms.

✅ The strategies that convert site visitors into buyers.

Most businesses fail to accurately define their personas because they:

X rush the process

X rely too heavily on assumptions

X do not conduct effective interviews

X do not capture unbiased interviewees

X do not have experience.

Stop Wasting Your Marketing Spend

We have extensive experience in researching and documenting buyer personas.

The amount of time and effort you put into establishing your personas is directly correlated to the results you achieve from your marketing efforts.

Persona Development Services: Our Process

It is central to our process that basic decisions about user segmentation, the attributes and behaviours attributed to personas are founded on research rather than guesswork.

Our process involves using a mix of qualitative and quantitative research data to build personas. We develop the personas in order specifically to guide:

✅ digital development:- what features are of most value to which personas? How should digital activities be prioritised?

✅ tracking of customer segments:- how can an organisation track the online behaviour and user journeys of key segments?

Our exceptional persona development services process includes but not limited to:

Step 1: Persona Discovery

We will meet with you and your team to learn as much about your business, your customer personas and discovery call that brings to light all of the pain points you currently face and the goals you intend to achieve.

We want to understand how you work with customers, how you think they perceive your brand and value and who your ideal buyers are.

Your dedicated persona development consultant will spend time learning your industry, what separate you from your competitors and how customers and buyers interact with you now.

We will also identify what your goals are for attracting more customers that fit the persona we are developing, unearths new opportunities for you to achieve higher ROI on each conversion, map specific content types back to defined buyer personas and how you plan to market to them.

We start by reviewing the existing data on your online customers which will help to build an initial high-level segmentation.

This may include:

✅ existing qualitative research (e.g. focus groups, usability testing) with your online customers

✅ existing analytics data

✅ any publically available research data or findings about customer behaviour in your market sector.

From this – we will:

✅ Create an initial segmentation of your customers by demography, device use, which we will use to recruit for qualitative research.

✅ Identify knowledge gaps and decide what issues we need to understand in more depth about your online customers’ behaviour.

Step 2: Persona Review

At this stage – we will use persona research tools and research methods to develop a more detailed picture of your customers’ behaviours and attitudes.

We will 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 – what it is that makes them tick.

The sessions will be structured to an agreed framework in a discussion guide. This will involve a combination of open discussion and structured tasks on your website or app.

We will typically seek to understand from participants:

✅ their device behaviour: how they use different devices to access your site, and what factors govern their choices

✅ their needs: what are the main things that they need to find on your website; what types of reassurance are they looking for

✅ their frustrations/ pain points: what aspects of your website are likely to deter them from completing a task or transaction

✅ their buying behaviour: what are the key factors that influence their decision to purchase

✅ their attitudes: particularly how they think about making purchases online in your market sector.

By collecting and developing targeted questions from your team and your customers, we can customise a strategy to dive deep into current prospect metrics, lead tracking systems and demographic information.

Step 3: Persona Interviews

By conducting interviews – you are much more likely to get unbiased, honest answers. Some of the most valuable information you can have when defining a buyer persona comes straight from the horse’s mouth.

We will contacts your customers that we can interview. These contacts should be made up of current customers, past customers and lost customers.

From here, we will aim to have brief interviews with as many as possible to fill any gaps in our persona research.

You can co-ordinate and schedule meetings at your convenience based on the stakeholders involved on your side.

Your persona development 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.

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Step 4: Persona Research

Sales and marketing efforts to your persona should be much different depending on what stage of their buyer journey they are in.

Using our conversations with the interviewees, we will help you to define the full buyer journey for your persona.

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.

We want to understand what the early Awareness of a problem/challenge/opportunity looks like for your persona.

We will work from that moment forward to identify what takes them from simple Awareness to actively Considering options to solve their Problem.

Finally we will define how they work through their Decision stage in selecting the final solution.

From here – we begin the formal stages of conceptualisation and journey mapping.

Your consultant will partner with Best-Digital Marketing creative team to create and craft specific personas that are human – not just vague sketches of buyers on paper.

Step 5: Persona Development

Every content marketing asset should subsequently aim to serve a specific user intent – that is how you drive ROI.

The findings of the qualitative research will be the basis for developing online customer personas – typically 4 to 6 personas in all.

Each persona will normally be described on a single page to a similar format. This will include:

✅ the persona’s “name” and some demographic indicators

✅ a description of their online behaviours and attributes across all their digital activities

and specifically in relation to your website/market sector:

✅ their device use (what devices do they use when)

✅ their buying behaviour (what are their normal purchasing patterns)

✅ their needs and frustrations (what is likely to motivate or inhibit purchase decisions)

✅ high value features and functionality (what would be of particular value to this persona).

Once the personas have been developed in draft, we will discuss with your persona creative and development team to present the personas and discuss how the personas can contribute to your UX strategy.

Each persona has an intended goal. In total, the goal is always to make you money.

Some of your site visitors may only be seeking information. Others may be looking to purchase from you at that exact moment.

To distinguish between the two – 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.

Step 6: Persona Presentation

To embed the personas into the measurement of online behaviour, the personas need to be incorporated into the segmentation used by our online metrics software.

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 one.

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 team enables your business to stay on message at all times.

We will work with your analytics team to:

✅ create a segmentation within your analytics tools to reflect the online personas to measure key indicators by segment.

✅ set measurable goals per segment.

This allows you to gain an understanding of how the online activity of your customer segments is changing over time and how changes to features and functionality affect the behaviour and user journeys of each persona.

Want To Explore Your Business Buyer Personas?

Buyer Persona Deliverables

The key buyer persona deliverables are:

✅ A full set of personas, validated by both quantitative and qualitative research

✅ A summary of research findings

✅ A segmentation within your analytics tools to reflect the agreed personas.

Example Buyer Persona

Building customer personas helps teams to address the following questions:

Who are our customers?
What are their common behavioural patterns?
What are their shared pain points (professional and personal)?
What are their universal goals/objectives?
What general demographic and psychographic information may influence their decisions?
What drives them to make purchasing decisions?
Is the customer the buyer/decision maker?

benefits of buyer personas

At Best-Digital Marketing – our persona development services provide a wide variety of potential benefits from using personas to drive digital development.

These include the following but not limited to:

✅ Research findings can be encapsulated and personalised in individual users – it can be a simple way to communicate complex research data.

✅ Users’ goals and needs can be a common point of focus for the UI development team.

✅ The UI team can concentrate on designing for a manageable set of personas knowing that they represent the needs of many users.

✅ Design decisions can be based on how the user interface design meets identified user goals/needs rather than subjective ideas of good design.

✅ Features can be prioritised based on a clear understanding of which user groups will benefit.

✅ User data can be segmented by personas, giving a more intelligent understanding of user behaviour.

stages of the buyer’s journey

Draw a straight line from persona to conversion. That is how we define success in persona development campaign and it is how we guide content strategy and marketing programs.

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

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

Awareness

Your customers are out there waiting to see high quality content. However at this stage, they are being introduced to your brand.

They may have landed on your site organically or heard great things about your brand and business.

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 and business.

Decision

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 are seeking product demos, price comparisons and any metrics that can help paint you in the best light.

Action

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.

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 buyer’s journey funnel.

convince & convert consulting: Best-Digital Marketing

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

On average – buyer persona-driven marketing campaigns are more cost-effective and resource-efficient – they reduce lead conversion time and allow you to focus only on interested leads – the ones that count.

At Best-Digital Marketing – our goals are to:

✅ attract more customers that fit your buyer persona we are developing

✅ discover new opportunities for you to achieve higher ROI on each conversion

✅ map specific content types back to defined buyer personas

✅ how you plan to market to these potential prospects.