If you want to increase your sales and revenue, start with the customers in mind. To do that, you need to deep dive into two things: buyer behavior and buyer personas. 

What is Buyer Behavior?

What would it take for a person to buy your product or avail your service? Would it be the most number of reviews that your brand is the best in the market? Or would it be your product simply being there, in a customer’s line of sight, when they decide to purchase? 

How people decide to purchase is referred to as the “buyer behavior,” and experts say it is the driving force behind any marketing process. 

You see, learning more about the buyer’s behavior reveals aspects that can increase your sales or revenue. What makes them choose Brand A over Brand B? What makes them so loyal to Brand C? How would you show that your product also has these advantages and more?

To get you started in understanding the buyer, let’s talk about the types of buyer behavior. 

Types of Buyer Behavior

Buyer behavior is influenced by the person or company’s involvement in the decision to purchase a product. Subsequently, the involvement depends on the risk or the price - the more expensive the product or service is, the more involved the customer becomes. 

Based on these principles, we have these four types of buyer behavior:

1. Complex

   
   

   Complex or extensive buying behavior points to high involvement, usually due to the financial (or psychological) risk involved. A buyer does extensive research before deciding to purchase. For instance, people typically do a lot of research and take more time when it comes to investing in a house or car. 

   
   

2. Dissonance-Reducing

   
   This type of buying behavior requires high involvement, but the buyer’s decision making is limited. For instance, when buying a vacuum cleaner, customers often worry about choosing the right brand. But in the end, they still purchase something without extensive research. 

   
   

3. Habitual

   
   Habitual buying behavior has low involvement in decision making. Usually, this behavior applies to everyday, inexpensive items. In case you lose a pair of socks, for example, you might just get another pair that’s within your budget because there’s not much difference between brands. 

   
   

4. Variety-Seeking

   
   This kind of behavior also has low involvement in decision making and customers typically switch between brands because there are significant differences. Case in point: one time you might buy the vanilla-scented shampoo because you like the scent, but later switch to another variety because it helps with hair loss.

When your business understands how your customers behave in connection to your brand, you’ll learn more about their demographics. And when you have more information about the customers, you can now create buyer personas. 

What are Buyer Personas?

Buyer personas are fictional “characters” or profiles that represent your ideal customers. You may name your persona, say, Andie: a stay-at-home mother of 2 who focuses most of her time on child rearing and chores. Or maybe you can have Aaron, a 28-year-old corporate worker who dabbles in numerous freelancing jobs. 

Creating spot-on buyer personas help increase your sales or revenue by making sure that:

• You focus your efforts and time on qualified prospects

• The product development (including website content) is aligned with what your customers need or want

• Your marketing reaches or relates to high-quality customers that are likely to buy and become loyal to your brand

If you have a food business, between Andy and Aaron, who would more likely be interested in ready-to-eat meals? Who would want to learn more about meal prepping?  

Note, however, that buyer personas are unique to each brand or company. There’s no one-size-fits-all persona and you can have several that your brand caters to. 

Developing the Buyer Personas for Your Business

There’s no manual to developing buyer personas. As mentioned earlier, they are unique to each brand or company. But you can consider these tips in developing one or several for your brand:

• Look through your database - How do potential customers or audiences find your products or content? Maybe an important characteristic of your persona is they frequently use social media. 

• Take the opportunity to collect information through forms you create on your website. 

• Ask your sales team for a trend: What information can they provide regarding the leads they are interacting with?

• Create polls or surveys that your audience can participate in. 

Once you have all these pieces of information, you can start brainstorming and developing your personas. There are also numerous templates online, which can guide you through the development. 

After crafting your buyer personas, note that you have to assess them first. How are the conversation rates when you focus your efforts on the personas? What strategies worked for what persona? From there, you can either retain the personas you have, make tweaks, remove some, or develop more. 

The Bottom Line

If you want to increase your sales and revenue, targeting a high quality audience is crucial. We, at BT partners, can help you zone in on the audiences/customer groups that matter and reap richer, more useful insight that you can use to develop more effective sales and marketing strategies. 

Want to know more on how we can help? Get in touch with us today at marketing@btpartners-asia.com.