As a medical device organization, you have developed a great new technology that is clinically relevant. You are intimately confident that the healthcare market wants it and that success is around the corner. But have you defined your ideal Buyer Persona?
You also feel that you understand your market dynamics. You know that patients need your product for their well-being, that physicians want it to provide the best possible care, that hospitals will not pass on the opportunity, and that agents and distributors are simply dying to make it available to everyone. Life is good! But if I ask you, are you 100% confident that you know the exact profile of your top 3 ideal customers, based on internal data, ROI and industry research, you may hesitate.
You already know that it is impossible for you to reach your target if you don’t know where you are aiming! If that’s the case, you have a problem that needs to be solved fast.
The purpose of this Buyer Persona blog is to give you an actionable methodology to do just that. For the purpose of this exercise, we will call it “defining your ideal buyer persona profiles”.
A Buyer Persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on qualitative and quantitative data.
In its most simple form, here are the 5 data-points that you need to know about each one:
- Who is he/she?
- What type of company does he/she works for?
- What are his/her goals?
- What are his/her challenges?
- What solutions are you able to provide?
Why it’s So Important to Define a Buyer Persona
Because the answers to these 5 questions must be the center-piece of your marketing communication strategy. Please keep in mind that your buyer personas do not care about your company or your products. Their only goal is to solve their problems and succeed. If you can persuade them, through your messaging strategy, that you have solutions to help them thrive, they will become faithful customers. If you can’t, they will simply ignore you and consider your marketing campaigns as simply noise… no matter how much you invest.
This is not rocket science, but sadly, most companies only communicate with their audience to say “how great” they and their products are, instead of sharing how they can help!
The Method to Create a Buyer Persona
Developing your Buyer Persona is a team project that requires input from your sales, marketing and potentially you finance departments.
The best way to do it is to organize a full-day workshop dedicated to the exercise.
If you can do it yourself using the MT-7 Buyer Persona templates, you may want to consider having MedTech Momentum organize for you a private Buyer Persona workshop on location with your team.
Contact us today to find-out how to make it happen!
During the workshop, you and your team will follow a 3-Step process:
Step 1 – Brainstorm
- Based on your experience, stats and financial data, try to identity who you believe are your ideal customers
- During the process, give each one a fictitious name (ex: Dr. Jones Entrepreneur)
- Answer the 7 key questions underneath, as they relate to Dr. Jones (Demographics, Backgrounds etc.)
- Write everything down (Paper Board)
Step 2 – Select, Categorize & Find Consensus
- The team discussion will lead you naturally toward eliminating the non-relevant answers explored in the brainstorm cession.
- You will use the paperboard find consensus and list the final answers corresponding to the 7 categories of questions.
Step 3 – Create Identity Cards
- At the end of the workshop, your marketing lead will take the information in “Step 2” to create the identity card of each Buyer Persona using our template.
- Having an easily sharable graphic image of the Buyer Persona will create alignment across the organization and guide all content creation (Website, Articles, Blogs, Posts, Videos etc.).
The 3-steps process is repeated for each Buyer Persona.
If conducted efficiently, at the end of the workshop, you will have the identity card of your Top 3 Ideal Buyer Personas, allowing the company to consistently aim at the right target with the right message.
