Who Am I, Anyway?

Who Am I, Anyway?

Why buyer personas are important for your brokerage.

BY MARK QUADROS | SPECIAL TO NATIONAL MORTGAGE PROFESSIONAL

Do you know who you are selling to?

No, I am not talking about a description weighed down with numbers and data that goes like a Government I.D.

If I urged you to rack your brain to visualize your ideal customer – how would you go about it?

Sounds complicated, right? It doesn’t have to be.

WHAT ARE THE MARKETING PERSONAS?

A descriptive and data-driven visualization of your ideal customer is called a buyer persona. When you know who you are ‘selling’ too – – you can appeal to people who are more likely to stay with you for a long time.

Furthermore, possessing a richer grasp of your buyer persona(s) drives other marketing components such as product development, content creation, cold emailing, and lead nurturing. It could also reveal an opening in the market to educate customers on why they need your product.

Depending on the size and volume of your business, you will have multiple buyer personas. Let me break it down:

Composite Sketch – A buyer’s persona is not a static description. Instead, it continually evolves with the nature of your business and the consumer landscape. A reliable persona is a true reflection of the customer faction it is supposed to represent.

Primary Audience Segment – Building upon the idea that a buyer persona is ever-evolving, it represents different segments within your primary audience group.

Marketing personas are instrumental in helping you better understand existing and prospective customers. Consequently, it makes it easier to create content and messaging tailored to your target audience’s specific needs and behaviors.

While you could create tens of personas, let’s start small and dive into why you should create buyer personas and how they can help boost your small business.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BUYER PERSONAS

Personas are created through a careful market research process progressing from data discovery, collection, cleaning, analyzing, and finally – visualization. Most organizations rely on their existing customer data to understand what categories they fit into and the varied behaviors exhibited by them.

However, if your business is at a nascent stage or testing markets for a new service, exploring external customer datasets is a route you should take.

Let’s demystify the importance of buyer personas before you get started on building them.

#1. Understanding Your Ideal Customer

What do you want to learn about your customers beyond the regular, standard information you already have of them on record?

Your existing customer data might have a few answers. Looking through it carefully will expose trends about their consumption pattern and buying behavior. How many times do they open your marketing emails? How many times do they purchase a specific product?

For instance, Josh has been buying a new pair of shoes with each change of season for the last three years, and he always times his purchase with emails informing about fresh collection launches. A few questions to uncover his background could be about the industry he works in, income range, and personality identifiers like a calm, innovator, etc.

Mortgage brokers can extrapolate an approach to identify their buyer personas accurately. This, in turn, will solidify your understanding of your target base and help you meet their needs better.

#2. Strengthen Your Offering

Maintaining a customer list is an important part of any small business’s operations.

Your existing customers will provide actionable insight and are a goldmine of valuable information for you because as branch manager for its new branch in Boulder, CO. they have interacted with your products and services, experienced them for a while, and engaged with your company.

As a result, they can provide data and insights that you can then feed into your sales records, grow your marketing collateral, and boost your next campaigns and product/service offerings.

#3. Create a Customer-Centric Culture

By tapping into customer testimonials and building accurate buyer personas, a small business doesn’t only boost customer relations with its existing base but also boosts its chances of being discovered by prospects.

Embedding this customer-first mindset into a small business culture will go a long way in the future, as your business grows. Customer satisfaction should remain a focus area, no matter the size of your business.

CONCLUSION

A changing landscape of various consumer behaviors means that this buyer persona(s) will continuously evolve.

Understanding the different personas of people who benefit from your products and service offering will help you build your efforts to grow your customer base, retain your customers, and boost your profits overall.

Mark Quadros is a SaaS content marketer who helps brands create and distribute rad content.