Connecting with your customers. The right way.

Do You Know Your Customers: a Quick Guide to Creating Buyer Personas

The biggest SaaS goal, or any business goal, for that matter, is to make a profit. While the plan might be straightforward, how we achieve it is somewhat mysterious. SaaS developers want to sell. And that’s because developers don’t have SaaS buyer personas to lead them in their marketing and sales efforts. Creating buyer personas can bring your business several benefits, including in the product development area. Let’s dive into our guide and see how a SaaS developer can complete this process.

What are buyer personas?

All companies have target audiences and are misled into thinking those are their buyer personas. It’s not so. Target customers are a big chunk of the existing market. Your effort must first go into segmenting those users based on different considerations. You need to create groups joined by customer pain points, interests, and behaviors.

The next step is creating persona SaaS templates, which aim to create a real customer profile. By taking the time to complete this profile, you are looking into all kinds of specific details like age, gender, and job title, all of which will assist you in building sales and marketing messages that resonate with groups.

A buyer persona allows you to segment your marketing strategy and conduct different campaigns simultaneously. You will thus increase customer loyalty, conversion rate, and, ultimately, profit.

What does your buyer persona stand for?

Generally speaking, when creating a buyer persona, you are in fact creating a profile of your ideal customer. Now, before we go any further with this discussion, it is important to mention that ideal does not mean imaginary. You will not be thinking about imaginary characters and put down every little detail that crosses your mind. Ideal means the customer for whom you have designed the product and the buyer persona template is designed on actual data such as their industry, gender, location, age. These should not be your fundamental data, but rather the starting point. Through buyer personas, you are looking for something else. You don’t want to get to know your customer intimately, but rather the reasoning behind the decision to choose your product/service. If you know what makes your customer choose you, you can start advertising those exact reasons through all existing channels and convince an even greater number of customers. That’s why buyer personas are often considered the secret sauce of any solid marketing campaign and not only.

Developing Personas: What are the benefits?

Buyer personas are a handful; we’ll give you that. Given the amount of time you need to dedicate to this ordeal and the patience and meticulosity, it’s only natural to ask yourself the big WHY question. So, it’s best to answer it now. Here are the advantages you gain as a result of having buyer personas.

Gain a deeper understanding of your customers.

Buyer personas teach you things you might not have known about your potential customers. This applies to your existing customers as well. A profile of your ideal customers gives you a better sense of your users’ likes and dislikes, habits, challenges, preferred purchasing methods, demographic details, and so on. It lets you connect with them on multiple levels, improving your overall activity.

Target your marketing efforts.

All businesses run campaigns and offer deals and promotions, but for some reason, the results in terms of sales aren’t always what you’d expect. Having a buyer profile helps you target those campaigns. For instance, a 7-day free trial isn’t enough for your customers to test your product. Knowing this detail, you might be tempted into offering a 14-day trial. Powerful SaaS eCommerce solutions offer you localization services. Maybe you could add specific payment methods and currencies should you realize that most of your customers reside in a particular location.

Learning how to price SaaS correctly based on customer profiles is possible. Targeting your offers means cutting losses, which is a huge gain. Personalized approaches lead to well-spend advertising dollars.

Create better products.

As a SaaS developer, you know that you constantly need to work on your product. By adding features or launching enhanced versions, you need to keep up with the market and your users’ expectations. Creating a customer persona allows you to identify features your users would benefit from and find value in.

Support your sales and marketing teams.

By having a deeper understanding of your clients, your marketing and sales teams would obtain crucial information and do their jobs more effectively. Think how much having detailed buyer personas can help in the sales process. Your sales team could provide relevant content in demos or maximize the number of qualified leads.

Create a buyer persona in 4 steps

Before we dive into the steps you need to take to create customer personas, it’s relevant to point out that you should build different buyer personas depending on the focus of your marketing strategies and business needs. A buyer persona can help you better price your product, create compelling discounts and offers, and fine-tune your sales speech.

So, consider the elements that might help you and integrate them into your profiles. Additionally, considering who should be involved in creating your buyer personas, it is clear that the marketing and sales teams need to exchange information and collaborate to complete the process.

Step 1: The research phase

Everything starts here. Your buyer persona research is one of the most important phases, and you must treat it accordingly. You need to know who is part of your customer base.

When researching construction personas, look at details like location, age, language, spending patterns, interests, stage of life, customer pain points, and so on. Use audience insights tools like Google Analytics. Involve your SaaS customer service team. After all they are the ones communicating with your users. Your SaaS customer service experts know what your customer need. Gain as many details as possible regarding your target audience.

Step 2: Analyze customer pain points

These are the game changers in building solid customer profiles. Your customer experience depends on it. Your customer goals and pain points are what drive users to your product. Think about reaching out to your existing customer base and ask for feedback. It is essential to understand their purchasing motivation to build the ideal customer profile.

Step 3: Create your persona

Compile your research findings into a profile and multiple ones. Your data could be sufficient to build several audience segments. You will have different customer types and be able to target them on different occasions. Personalize them by giving them names.