Creating Buyer Personas in 5 Steps

Regardless of what industry you are in, creating buyer personas is important to every business because customers aren’t buying the same way they used to.  Sales and marketing get a bad rap because many still have not shifted to this new targeted approach.  Today, buyers favor personalization and relevancy.  The old school way of generalized in your face marketing isn’t palatable to buyers anymore.

The new way takes some finesse and strategic planning but leads to higher sales and higher retention.  The buzz is all about defining your buyer persona. So, what exactly are buyer personas? Buyer personas are simply semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers. They help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) better, and make it easier for you to tailor messaging and content to the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of different groups.

Here we discuss how to create a buyer persona in five steps and use data to create content that will attract these specific personas to your website and convert them.

Creating Buyer Personas in 5 steps

1.) Create Your Character

Depending on your business, you could have as few as one or two personas, or as many as 10 or 20. (Note: If you’re new to personas, start small. You can always develop more personas later.) Start by creating a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on research and real data of your current customers. Get specific. Where do they live? What do they do? What keeps them up at night?  What are their challenges? What are their goals? What motivates them? What do they complain about? What excites them?

Be sure to gather the following information:

• Demographic (population, race, income, education and employment)
• Behavioral (results of actions)
• Psychographic (attitudes, interests, personality, values, opinions and lifestyle)
• Geographic (location)

Connect the persona to their personal life as well. It is key to bridge who they are personally as well as professionally. The lines between professional and personal are more blurred these days. Use this to your advantage. The more details you fill in the easier it will be to market to this person. The more intimately you understand their pain points the easier you can provide them with solutions. What do they need, where and when do they need it and how can you help?

 2.) Do the Research

What do your customers want?

• Survey them
• Social Listening
• Backend analytics
• Analyze competitors
• Keyword planning

3.) Deliver Value

Based on your findings, use the data to script your content. Educate your target audience with how you solve their problems. Hit those pain points. Create blogs that answer the questions about their problems. The more problems you identify, the more blog topics you have.

Paint the picture of what they are dealing with clearly so that they resonate with your marketing. Connect their professional life to their personal life.

This value will make you an expert in your field. You will be perceived as a friendly associate, not a cutthroat sales person looking to simply close the deal. This type of marketing can lead to referrals even from people who haven’t bought from you yet.

Download the Ebook: How to Create Buyer Personas

4.) Analyze Results

The key is to analyze the data to clearly understand what’s working and what’s not working. Start your data analysis efforts by understanding the following:

• Where are your best leads coming from?
• Which are the most highly visited pages on your website?
• How long did they stay on your website?
• How long did they read your blog or visit your web pages?
• How many converted?
• Which content offers are getting the most eyeballs and conversions? And which are not?

Give value in exchange for information. Create an e-book or some other form of easily distributed information that you can exchange for their personal information.

5.) Create Options

Once you have defined your first persona, look to develop other personas where strong patterns present themselves. Based on your products, you may have very different buyers and end-users involved in the decision-making process. Be precise in your marketing but keep tabs as trends evolve.

The more fine-tuned you can be about your persona, the more effective you can be at marketing to them.

Questions to ask when building your buyer persona

1. Define your perfect buyer
   • What is the demographic?
   • Where do they live?
   • What do they drive?
   • What motivates them?
2. What is their job level? Education level?  What keeps them up at night?
3. What is a day in their life? Don’t just focus on their work life.  What is their home life about?  Personality?
4. What are their pain points?
5. What does your buyer value the most?
6. Where do they go to seek information?
7. What experience are they looking for? Align their expectations with reality.
8. What objections must you overcome?

When you spend the time to really dial in your buyer persona and answer their questions throughout the buying process, you will notice ease of content creation and fill your funnel with quality sales leads.

Are you ready to build a strategy that gets results?