How to Create Buyer Personas

WHAT IS A BUYER PERSONA?

DEFINITION OF A BUYER PERSONA

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.

When creating your buyer persona(s), consider including customer demographics, behaviour patterns, motivations and goals. The more detailed you are, the better. Buyer personas provide tremendous structure and insight for your company. A detailed buyer persona will help you determine where to focus your time, guide product development and allow for alignment across the organisation. As a result, you will be able to attract the most valuable visitors, leads and customers to your business. Ready to put this definition into practice?

Let's learn how to create a detailed buyer persona for your business.

 

BUYER PERSONA VS BUYER PROFILE

WHAT IS AN IDEAL BUYER PROFILE?

Buyer profiles define the different buying patterns of companies you ideally aim to do business with.

Before you can identify potential buyers, you need to define which buyers you can help and which you can’t. The ideal buyer profile defines which companies are a good fit for your offering and which ones are not. If you are a B2B company, the definition of a buyer profile should be at the company level, not the contact level -- that is, even if your point of contact doesn’t typically make the purchasing decision, they’re still valuable to speak with if their company matches your ideal buyer profile.

Six questions you should ask yourself to identify your ideal buyer profile:

 

 

 

 

 

 

WHY IS A BUYER PERSONA IMPORTANT?

You won’t be able to position what you’re selling to meet customers’ (and potential customers’) needs without knowing who they are. How well do you know your ideal customers’ backgrounds, their goals, and their challenges? How well do you understand their interests and needs? Do you know how old they are? Where they went to school? Whether they have kids? What a day-in-the-life looks like?

These questions may sound specific, but here’s the thing...

Creating very specific buyer personas can dramatically improve your business results.

marketing outreach? You’ve been to enough “meet and greets” to know there are some clients who just don’t understand the true cost or time required to design and develop a website or create a public relations strategy.

 

It is important to know:

What Buyer Persona(s) are, how you can use them, and how to create them. Keep scrolling and you’ll find out how to create buyer personas for your business.

• At the most basic level, personas allow you to personalise or target your marketing for different segments of your audience. For example, instead of sending the same lead nurturing emails to everyone in your database, you can segment by buyer persona and tailor your messaging according to what you know about those different personas.
• If you take the time to create negative personas, you’ll have the added advantage of being able to segment out those that you specifically do not want to target from the rest of your contacts. This can help you achieve a lower cost-per-lead and cost-per-customer (and see higher sales productivity) because this highly focused approach will only attract precisely the right target persona(s).
• When combined with lifecycle stage (i.e. how far along or where someone is, in your sales cycle), buyer personas also allow you to map out and create highly targeted content and identify conversion points.

 

Buyer personas are created through research, surveys, and interviews of your target audience. That includes a mix of customers, prospects, and those outside of your contact database who might align with your target audience.

Here are some practical methods for gathering the information you need to develop personas:

INTERVIEW CUSTOMERS
Interview customers -- and potential customers -- either in person or over the phone, to discover what they like about your product or service. Ask questions about their job role and title, what a typical day-in-the-life looks like (both at work and outside of work), what tools they use in their job, what their challenges are, how they learn new information or acquire new skills, where they’re from, how they search for information on the internet, and so on.

LOOK FOR BEHAVIOURAL TRENDS
Look through your contacts database to uncover trends about how certain leads or customers find and consume your content.

OPTIMISE FORMS FOR YOUR PERSONA
When creating forms to use on your website, use form fields that capture important persona information. For example, if all of your personas vary based on company size, ask each lead for information about company size on your forms.

TALK TO YOUR SALES TEAM
Consider your sales team’s feedback on the leads they are interacting with most. What types of sales cycles does your sales team work with? What generalisations can they make about the different types of customers you serve best?

SECTION 1: THE “WHO?”

In the first section, you’ll fill out your persona’s background, demographics, and identifiers (like demeanor and communication preferences).

SECTION 2: THE “WHAT”

Next, you’ll fill in your persona’s goals and challenges, followed by what your business can do to help them achieve their goals and overcome their challenges.

SECTION 3: THE “WHY”

Here’s where you can input real quotes from customers and potential customers from the surveys and interviews you conducted for persona research. You can also input common objections -- reasons your ideal buyers have said they wouldn’t want to buy your offering.

SECTION 4: THE “HOW”

Finally, you can fill in the marketing messaging you want to use for this particular target buyer. How should you describe your offering to this persona? What’s your elevator pitch to them?

Use this example as a guide to customise your own buyer personas, and use them to organise your audience segments and strengthen your marketing.