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As an eCommerce business owner, knowing your business’s target audience is just the bare minimum – to become that successful, one must define his/her business’s buyer persona accurately. Learn from Willy what a buyer persona is and how it can help you grow your business.
In this episode, Willy is going to cover:
– What is a buyer/customer persona;
– Why it is necessary to set up a buyer persona for your business;
– The three advantages of understanding your business’s buyer persona.
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TRANSCRIPTION
Many people often ask me, “Willy, I want to price my products at a higher price, but my current customers are not able to buy them. But those customers with higher buying abilities don’t seem interested in my products at all. How can I improve this situation?”
Now, the reason for this problem happening is because you have not clearly defined the buyer persona, or customer persona, for your business, which results in you not being clear of how to market your products properly. When doing business, we always need to have a specific goal in mind, or else we will be like shooting in the dark and going around aimlessly! In this episode, I shall talk about the importance of understanding your business’s buyer persona, and the 3 advantages that can come along if you have defined it clearly.
But before everything, let us first understand what is a buyer persona. A buyer persona is a detailed description of someone you wish to sell your products to. This is not a real customer, but a fictional person who possess all the characteristics of your best potential customers. You will give this customer a name, demographic details, interests, and behavioural traits. The idea is to think about and speak to this model customer as if they were a real person, so that you can come up with better strategies for selling your products.
Some of you may ask then: well, isn’t this the same as setting a target audience? Actually, it is not quite similar. You can understand it as such: a target audience is a broader group of customers you identify for your business before everything else, and you have a rough idea of their age group, their gender, their interests, etc. However, to make sure your products are saleable, you will want to know even more about your customers, like their goals, their pain points, their income levels and buying patterns etc. From there, you will be able to work backwards, and design products or marketing messages that cater specifically to their needs. And all this requires you to come up with a buyer persona.
Basically, a buyer persona will be a more refined and focused version of your target audience. And coming to that, since different groups of people within your target audience may buy your products for different reasons, you might want to create more than one buyer persona. This will allow you to “interact” more closely with the different segments of your target audience, and hence giving you better chances of selling your products.
If you are clear about that, let us move on to understand how coming up with a buyer persona will allow you to make better sales.
First of all, developing a buyer persona will make you more aware of who your customers are. Now, I don’t mean that you will get to know your customers personally, but setting up a buyer persona will allow you to grasp your customers’ buying capabilities, desires and needs better. For example, in the process of setting up a buyer persona, you will need to imagine your customers’ income levels. Do they belong to the middle-to-high income level, say, they are earning $100,000 per year? For this group of people, most probably they will only want to purchase products priced within the range of $50 to $100. But if your customers are earning even much more, like $200,000 per year, these people will likely be able to purchase products priced at $100+, $200+ or even more. Your understanding of your customers needs to be that specific so that you can price your products at the most comfortable price range that will attract your customers to buy them. This will save you lots of time, instead of you trying to trial-and-error and adjust your products’ prices all the time. Other than that, the next time you source for products, you can focus on getting only those products that fit the price range your customers can afford, hence making your sourcing attempts more relevant and efficient.
And this will lead us to the second advantage of understanding a buyer persona for your eCommerce business, which is: you can launch products that your customers want. Now, we need to acknowledge the fact that customers of different income brackets have different habits and lifestyles. This means they will want to buy products that they can incorporate into their lifestyles – whether it’s for actual usage or just for display purposes. For instance, I used to have this product, a typical, solid lemon squeezer which I want to sell to people belonging to the middle-high income level. I redesigned my product’s packaging, from its original plastic bag to become this very presentable black-coloured matte box that comes with gold lettering. Not surprisingly, this lemon squeezer became a great hit among my customers. Many of my customers feedback to me that they decided to buy from me because they feel that out of all the lemon squeezers out there, my lemon squeezer was the only one that gives them a ‘premium’ feel. They are proud to display it when people come to their houses, or when they gift it to friends.
But if you think about it, this is just a normal lemon squeezer! What made my product stand out from the rest is simply because I know what my customers are thinking of. For them, not only must the product be of good quality, it must also give them that ‘high-tier’ feel. And my lemon squeezer fits the bill, so of course, they are happy with it! Another excellent product to explain this logic will be the Dyson fan. Many people buy Dyson fans not only because they are of good quality, but also because this product is very presentable, and it gives people the ‘premium’ vibes. It seems like people who own a Dyson fan comes from a ‘higher-class’ who have more refined tastes. If you don’t believe me, just observe your feelings the next time you go over to a friend’s house who owns a Dyson fan. When the Dyson fan runs quietly in the background while your friend serves you dinner without batting an eyelid – wouldn’t you feel that tinge of jealously? This is the power of branding, and this is how the Dyson fan makers earn their sales from people too, because they know exactly what their customers want.
Last but not least, when you understand your business’s buyer persona, you will be able to provide your customers with the services they need. I always strongly believe in this saying: “happy customers, happy business”. Only when you can provide targeted customer services, will your business thrive and grow. I will use WAH Academy as an example: at WAH Academy, we target business owners who already have some experience in trading. Other than coaching these business owners on how to set up and run their businesses on Amazon, we also back up our coaching with great customer services. For any problems that our students may run into during our coaching, we will help them through various channels relentlessly until their issues are resolved. As such, our students are very happy with us, and in turn, we have a high rate of referral and our business thrive better.
You may tell me then: “But Willy, WAH Academy is a business coaching provider, my business is just selling things to customers on Amazon. Mine is not a service-based business!” But you must realise that your relationship with your customers doesn’t stop when they buy your products. You have to provide them with satisfactorily after-sales services so that your customers will come to trust you. The logic here is the same – once you can make your customers happy, they will also refer you to their friends, and in turn, you can make more sales.
In summary, here are the three advantages of understanding your business’ buyer persona:
No. 1: You are aware of who your customers are
No. 2: You can launch products that your customers want
No. 3: Vou can provide your customers with the services they need
So, are you more aware of how you should make use of your business’s buyer persona to grow your business? Stay tuned if you want to know more eCommerce tips like these, and I shall see you in the next episode.