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Buyer Personas For Professional Services
Professional Services can be a challenging industry for even experienced marketing professionals to go after. Buyer Personas can help because they give you a simple, powerful way for your sales and marketing teams to better understand, engage and impact your customers. When you build your efforts around the insights these kinds of profiles provide — customer needs, wants, drives, desires, pain points, priorities, etc. — making strategic decisions, allocating resources and choosing tactics gets much, much easier.
What are "best practices" for developing Buyer Personas for Professional Services?
To be useful, Professional Services customer profiles should represent the most valuable segments of your customer base (as defined by conversion rate, deal size, service frequency, contract length, expertise requirements, etc.), be organized around a framework that is directly related to your individual produce or service, like use cases, pain points, journey maps, buying triggers, jobs-to-be-done, lifestyle choices, life stages, professional affiliations, etc., and include personal and professional characteristics that facilitate empathy and understanding, like needs, drives, priorities, pain points, KPIs, etc.
How long does it take to create Buyer Personas for Professional Services?
If you’re committing to formal research that will include customer surveys, focus groups, one-on-ones, etc., then you’re likely to spend two or three months collecting and analyzing data, segmenting your customer base, and mapping your findings. On the other hand, when formal research isn’t an option, you can usually develop actionable Buyer Personas from personal observations and experiences in just a few hours. The key is to leverage whatever customer knowledge you can get, whether it’s coming from professional researcher or an afternoon white-boarding session with your team.
What do you do with Buyer Personas for Professional Services?
The biggest problem with Buyer Personas in the days before generative AI is that they just end up in a folder that never gets opened a second time. Now, these types of customer profiles can be incorporated into prompts, allowing you to dynamically generate personalized content and collateral like blog posts, emails, white papers, 1-sheets, etc.
In Professional Services, that could mean creating targeted content for different industries or client types, such as personalized blog posts offering financial advice for small businesses or content focused on legal compliance for healthcare providers. You could also develop customized email campaigns offering your professional services based on the client’s industry, needs, or past interactions.
Guides, eBooks & Downloadable Resources: