Imagine this scenario… YOU want to buy a widget. On your journey to buy that widget, you exhibit buyer persona characteristics proprietary to you. That means your perceptions about the reasons you want to buy that specific widget apply ONLY to you. They are first created in your mind and then they show up in your behavior. You know what matters to you. The things that matter the most to you drive you to buy the widget. Keeping this idea in mind, let’s look at you, the small business owner.

In your marketing, most likely you are offering products or services. If your offer’s wording in your marketing materials doesn’t match what’s in the mind of your ideal prospect, you have no sale. When you have few to no sales, instead your prospect thinks you are saying (when the prospect reads your marketing copy) that you want your prospects to want what YOU want them to want.

In this scenario, you reveal you do not know what really matters to your ideal prospect. Instead, you have identified what matters to YOU. Wanting a prospect to make life easy for you by accepting your offer is not how business is successfully done. A prospect has dreams. Your marketing copy needs to sound like YOU are already living the dream your prospects want to live. Writing about how your prospects can live their dreams (that’s what matters to your prospects) is often very different from the copy on your website. How can you change things and improve customer sales conversions?

The truth is a person who wants to buy your products or services naturally exhibits certain sell-absorbed characteristics. Remember, YOU are sometimes a buyer as well. That means when you want to buy something, YOU are acting self-absorbed at that moment to get you to want you to want to buy.

Buyer Persona Nuts And Bolts

Outlining a buyer persona with the right buying signal characteristics can help you clearly identify who will buy from you. An outline such as this helps you identify who your ideal customer really is. Taking the time to really know your customer means you reveal on paper behaviors, goals and interests similar to ALL people buying from you. Done effectively, you create a useful buyer persona inventory checklist. The more traits made apparent to you about what really matters to your ideal buyer, the more effective your marketing and advertising becomes.

Buyer personas can be used in your business as a checklist from which to conduct your marketing. You create a buyer persona for your product or service by using research, surveys, and interviewing your target audience. During an interview with your current customers, be a good listener without interrupting. Give them a chance to tell you about their world, their challenges, and what they think of your product or service.

You’ve already read basically about the importance of creating a buyer persona. The next step is to actually build one for each of your products and/or services. In part two of this topic, you will be guided through how to create a buyer persona. It is actually an easy exercise in which to engage. However, it does take time and thought-provoking effort on your part to complete the exercise. Stick with me here on this. Intimately knowing your audience and taking the time to look ONLY for the most common buying traits will be a great ROI on your time investment. See you in part two of working With A Buyer Persona.