How to Use Buyer Personas to Understand Your Customers in a Post-COVID World

Sales are the engine of your business, and it is important to understand who your customer is and what value you can provide them. There is no generic customer, and each person has distinct backgrounds, personalities, and interests. With the changes due to COVID, it is essential to build a richer understanding of your customers to better navigate through the challenges. This is best achieved through creating buyer personas, which are avatars of your target customers. To do this, understand the attributes you want to capture, build multiple personas for different customer profiles, conduct customer interviews, involve your team, and undertake independent research. Aggregate the research and interviews, build a solid template, and make personas specific and humanized. Lastly, embed personas in your business.

Building buyer personas helps to better understand customer pain points, wants, and needs. This enables businesses to make better decisions that cascade through all functions. It is important to limit the development of personas to the smallest number of profiles that still capture the diversity of customers. This can be done by speaking to customers and gathering insights from your team and independent research. Once developed, the personas should be shared among the team and used for sales and marketing decisions.

Good buyer personas should be individualized to capture unique attributes and indicate the personal buying drivers of each segment. They should contain demographic, psychographic, and behavioral attributes, and be as real as possible. The goal is to build a snapshot of each of your target customer profiles, which will help make decisions more authentic and reliable. Ultimately, this will help businesses understand customers and provide better value.