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Inbound Marketing Blog

How Small Business Can Better Understand Their Buyers To Improve Their Marketing and Sales

Posted by Stacie Chalmers on 24-May-2018 10:04:00

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To be successful with your marketing and sales today small business owners need to have a solid understanding of their buyers’ needs and wants. Understanding your buyers on a deeper level is incredibly beneficial for small businesses for a number of reasons. Having an insight into their buying motivations and habits, helps you to improve your marketing and communication to generate more leads and reduce your cost per lead, this valuable insight will also help you to improve your sales process so that it is more tailored and relevant to your buyers this will help to build relationships with your buyers and increase your conversion from lead to customer as well as boost your repeat and referral business. In this article, I’ll be offering some helpful tips and ways small business owners can better understand their buyers to improve their marketing and sales. 

The Importance of Buyer Personas

Buyer personas assist marketing, sales, and customer service relate to their buyers as real humans. Not only that, but buyer personas allow you to understand your buyers on an intimate level, knowing information about them like their jobs, what they are responsible for, what it means to be successful in their role, what are the challenges in their role and so on. Buyer personas also allow you to tap into your buyers even further, helping you understand the trigger event that led them to your business, and how your product or service can meet their needs and challenges.

By segmenting your buyers based on their gender, age, location, where they work, family size and how they spend their money will help you to improve your advertising and communication ensuring your message is getting to the right people.

Below is an example of what you should know about your buyers when creating detailed buyer personas. Just remember, the deeper you dig, the better.

  • Marital status
  • Children
  • Education level
  • Job role or title
  • Challenges
  • Goals
  • How they search and who they trust
  • What social media sites they use
  • Trigger event
  • What information they’re looking for
  • What experience is important to them
  • What content format they prefer

Keep the Conversation Going with Your Buyers

By reaching out and interacting with customers in a real-life setting, you will be able to gain an in-depth understanding of the actual needs and concerns of your buyers. And, by asking the right questions to people who matter, you will get to know why people buy from you. So … how do you find people to interview? I advise reaching out to existing customers or people who have gone through the buying process and didn’t buy from you. If you can the best way is to have a direct conversation with them over the phone or in person, if this isn’t possible you can also create a questionnaire and send it out via email or also on social media. If you are new to the market, it’s likely you already have an understanding of the demographic and people you’re selling to and what their pain points are, so start with this knowledge and build on that understanding through online forms, surveys and engaging with these people on social media and other networking opportunities.

The point of understanding your buyers is to really get to know them on a deeper level. It’s about understanding their pain points, challenges and what they need to be successful or to achieve their goals. It’s important to encourage your customers to open up during their interview, so it’s best if you try not to control the interview too much. You can do this by asking open-ended questions and really listening to what they have to say. Pay particular attention to the exact words they use as this will come in handy when it comes to creating a content strategy. After all, you want to understand what’s important to them when going through the buying process so you can better meet their needs and ultimately increase your sales.

At the end of the day, buyer personas are and should be dynamic. As a small business owner, you should always be looking for ways to improve upon what you already know about your buyers. That’s why you should regularly be asking them questions and encouraging feedback via online forms, surveys and follow-up calls. You can also monitor online forums and social media to get a better understanding of your buyers and build upon your existing knowledge. 

Learn about matching content with your buyer's journey.

Analyse Your Metrics

While conversing and interacting with your buyers is vital, when it comes to better understanding them, it doesn’t just stop here. Your website and social media metrics hold a wealth of information about your buyers, so it’s important to analyse this data if you want to better understand your buyers. Have a look at things like:

  • Blogs with the most views
  • Emails and subject lines with the most views and click-throughs
  • Your most downloaded content
  • Webinars that receive the most views
  • The most searched keywords that lead buyers to your website
  • Your most visited webpage and how long prospects spend on that page
  • The type of content customers/prospects have engaged with most on social media

Analysing these metrics provide you with a window into real-life customer actions, which help you better understand your buyers and how your business can best meet their needs and challenges.

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Topics: Buyer Persona

 

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