Customers are the lifeline of your business.

Without them buying your product or service, your business wouldn’t exist. Period. End of story.

So, if the customers are the most important driving force of a business, why do so many companies not pay close enough attention to them? In this blog post, we’ll explain the importance of creating customer personas in 2018 and some of the most common mistakes people make when making their persona marketing strategy.

If you follow this blog post and eliminate your possibility of making these mistakes, your company will see sustainable growth this year.

Creating buyer personas

In a recent blog post, we talked about how marketing without buyer personas is like wearing a blindfold. And, we weren’t lying! If you don’t know who you’re selling to, how are you supposed to market to them?

Making 2018 the year that you focus on your buyer personas will help your social media marketing efforts (not all personas are on the same platforms), your lead conversion and your overall revenue.

So, what are the most common mistakes we see when clients and other businesses are developing buyer personas? Keep reading to find out.

More often than not, when a potential company reaches out to us for marketing, they don’t have a persona marketing strategy. At Roketto, we ask each company who they are selling to and if they have any personas.

Buyer personas are the foundation to any marketing strategy.

Some people haven’t written down specific buyer personas, some people don’t even know their client base and some people have an idea but need some help. That’s okay, we’re experts when it comes to buyer persona research.

When it comes to your client base, who is your target market?

Is your ideal buyer persona a business owner, or are you marketing more towards a student?

Take an Orthodontist as an example, they could have a couple buyer personas:

1. A mom getting braces for their child
2. A teenager doing their own research for braces
3. An adult deciding that they finally need braces for themself

While this Orthodontist has 3 buyer personas, his primary one is the mother getting braces for her child because a significant amount of his current clients fall in that category.

Between 1-3 buyer personas is a good area to focus on. Anything more and you won’t be focusing enough effort on your primary buyer persona.

Try to narrow down who is your primary persona and who is your secondary. This will help in the future.

If we didn’t share our buyer personas at Roketto with our team, it would be a mess. Everyone on the team needs to know the different buyer personas because this information is useful in many different company departments. The same goes for every single company out there.

Everyone in your company should know your target customers. Not only is it good to have open communication, but the different departments will most likely have useful data or information on these buyer personas.

Plus, it will help with smooth customer service because you never know who will be talking to a potential client next.

While the buyer persona template consists of fictional representations of your clients, you need to remember that it’s not an aspirational version.

We see many companies that have the people they’re dreaming of buying their product or service as a buyer persona. The problem with this is that buyer personas should be created with data and not assumptions.

It’s okay to have an idea of the person you want to target in the future, but keep it on the backburner until you feel like you have the resources to reposition yourself to become more attractive to your ideal audience.

Try to stay grounded and relevant. Focus on the customer you’re currently serving the needs of.

When building your personas, it’s best to use buyer persona template

Within these customer persona templates many people write down what they think their buyer personas should be, or rely on anecdotal input from the team. This information results in a one-sided view of the company’s persona, but it might not actually be that realistic.

Instead, reach out to your customers - long-term and new. Handing out a questionnaire is a great way to have concrete data on who your actual customers are, why they need your product or service, the challenges their facing, where they find their information, etc.

Look at your clients, Google Analytics, social media, etc, to get customer data.

Base your buyer persona research on data not assumption. Real data will help leverage your buyer personas to actually become a great marketing tool.

Some people think that creating buyer personas are too difficult and don’t believe they have the time and resources to complete the task.

At the end of the day, persona development doesn’t take very long. You don’t need to go into great detail in the beginning and remember you can always add more information any time.

Your buyer personas are going to be a massive help to your content creation, social media and sales process. Once you know who you’re selling to, everything in your company will make a lot more sense.

It will save you time in the long-turn and ensure that you’re attracting the right people to your business.

If you don’t have time or a care in the world about buyer personas, your company is going to suffer in 2018.

But, if you still feel like you don’t have the time for buyer personas, reach out to Roketto today. We’re pros when it comes to creating buyer personas and we know the right questions to ask your client base to get the buyer persona research we need.

We hope that after reading these 6 mistakes a lot of companies make, you will stop your company from being added to that list.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed at researching your client base, but by making sure you’re not doing any of these things, your 2018 clients will thank you. Plus, you’ll be growing your business at the same time. A win-win.