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attached.
Why your storytelling and buyer personas must be believable
Always assume your prospects are savvy - because they are! It’s much harder to fool people - especially online now.
They are smart - smart enough to recognise the difference between fictional but believable and fictional and outlandish. They know when they’re being spun a line - and if you do that you risk turning them off, turning them away or making claims you can’t live up to.
You can see why it’s critical to make your characters and stories believable. People don’t care that they’re made up - provided they are plausible.
To help develop buyer personas, answer these questions about your target customers:
1. What does this person do?
2. What are they responsible for within their organisation?
3. What are they tasked with?
4. What is a typical working day for them?
5. What are their needs, wants and pain points?
6. What age are they (typically)?
7. What interests them?
8. Where do they hang out (in the real and digital world)?
9. What do they worry about most?
10. Who is their boss?
11. How do they look good at work (I don’t mean physically, I mean how can you
help them to look good to their colleagues, teams and bosses)?
12. What do they need to achieve in their job and in what timeframe?
13. What results are they looking for?
14. What is the perfect solution for them?
If you sell into international markets, be mindful of cultural considerations.
Why use buyer personas instead of market research?
Market research is expensive, time consuming and unnecessary for this type of exercise - unless you are running a business and you have little experience of your market or type of customer you wish to attract.
Most people who own, run or work in businesses have experience and expertise relevant to that area. It’s not difficult, in this case, to get to grips with answering the above questions about your ideal or target customers.
©Alison Campbell 2017 9