Full video transcript:
Buyer personas and customer journey maps are extremely important for brands who want to take a data-driven approach to their content. They help you understand what content you should create, how it should presented to your different audiences. And they directionalize everything you do from a digital perspective and also from a business perspective.
Buyer personas are snapshots in time of different segments within your unique target audience. Every persona group has similar behaviors within the group and they’re different across each group.
Customer journey maps show us how they engage with your brand over time. So, what channels are they using, what questions are they asking, what barriers do they face through the awareness phase, through consideration, conversion, all the way through to advocacy.
Ntara conducts both qualitative and quantitative research to create data-driven buyer personas. We encourage our clients to use personas for every strategy they develop, whether it’s for a website or product information management. It’s common for businesses to create strategies that support their own goals. But when you’re focused on the end user, when you’re focused on who’s actually going to use the solutions that you’re creating, then you create an experience that satisfies both the end user goals and the business goals.
With websites in particular, it’s really critical to consider the nuances of each buyer persona. What language do they use? What reading level are they at? What devices are they using? Are they primarily on desktop? Do they use tablet? Do they use mobile? Do you have any audience members who use screen readers or other devices to use your website?
For our own content marketing process, every piece of content we create has an intended persona audience and we review that persona before we even start creating the content just to make sure that we’re answering their specific questions.
With one manufacturing client, through the research that led to their personas, we found out that their most valuable client was willing to spend upwards of $500,000 a year more with these specific improvements to their website. That led to us creating a pilot site where we tested some functionality with a small group of their audience. And then we scaled that to a full B2B ecommerce website and they’re seeing the results of that today.
We also use buyer personas to guide our design process. For example, every wireframe we create, we think about which personas are going to use that page and how they’re going to navigate it.
So, these are just a few examples of how we use personas but the possibilities are really endless. We recommend—no matter what your business, no matter how many customers you have or how many people in your target audience—collect data about them and build out personas and customer journey maps to guide your digital strategy.
For more information about our research practice, visit ntara.com/research.