Buyer Personas

As a business, you need to know your buyer personas.

Buyer personas are your ideal customers based on:

• Data
• Research

Buyers persona can help:

• Focus on qualified prospects
• Develop products for target customers

Doing this helps your business:

• Attract valuable visitors, leads and customers
• Retain them long term

Understanding your buyer personas can also help create content that gives value to visitors.

Creating buyer personas is all down to:

• Market research
• Customer data

And then using this information to benefit both your customers and your business.

Why are buyer personas important?

Buyer personas help you better understand your:

• Current customers
• Potential customers

With this information you can solve their problems using your:

• Content
• Products

For example, you might know who your target audience is, but do you know:

• What do they need?
• What are they interested in?
• Their background?

This is why it’s a huge advantage to fully understand your customers or visitors.

The best buyer personas come from:

• Market research
• Surveys
• Forums

You could have one or 20 buyer personas, depending on your business.

But small with one and add more later, if you need to.

“Negative” buyer personas

A negative persona is the type of customers you don’t want.

This can be customers or visitors:

• Too advanced for your product or service
• Only using your content for research or knowledge
• Too expensive to acquire

How to use buyer personas in marketing

Personas help create content that your target audience will engage with.

Also allowing you to specifically target and personalise marketing for different segments of your audience.

Examples of this include:

• Personalised emails with the information in different personas
• Personalised message for different stages of your sales cycle
• Targeted content for different types of personas in your audience

Note: Create negative personas so you avoid contacts you dont want from the rest.

This helps to get:

• Lower cost-per-lead
• Lower cost-per-customer

And will result in more sales whilst lowering the cost of acquisition.

Types of Buyer Personas

You don’t have types of buyer personas or a set number of personas.

Each business is unique and because of this, their buyer personas are unique too.

So, identifying and creating your buyer personas will be different from other businesses, even your competitors.

But companies can have the same or similar categories for buyer personas.

All these factors like the different personas and the number of them is based on:

• Your target audience
• What your business offer them

Creating Buyer Personas

You can create buyer personas with:

• Research
• Surveys
• Forums

To do that, can use information from:

• Customers
• Prospects
• Copycat of your target audience

To gather the information you need to create personas, you can:

• Go through your own databases to find how visitors find and consume your content
• Use form to capture information on your website
• Use information from sales team’s feedback with leads they interact with most

After researching, you’ll have a lot of data about potential and current customers.

Next use this data to find any patterns and create at least one primary persona.

Start creating your personas by:

Note persona’s basic information

Note down your personas demographic information from online surveys.

You can do this without conducting online surveys and going on forums like Reddit or Quora.

Look for threads about your topic of research and you will find a lot of information from conversations between forum contributors.

Note persona’s motivations

Surveys and forums, as mentioned above, are a great place find personal information like:

• Problems
• Likes
• Dislikes

This information can be used to tailor content or product development so your company can help them.

Note: For content, look in your comment section to see visitors’ feedback.

Ask sales teams about conversations with personas

If you’re selling products then your sales team will be having conversations with current and potential customers.

They are holding a wealth of information like:

• What the majority of enquiries are about
• Top complaints by customers
• Patterns in general conversations

Other information includes:

• Personas concerns
• Who personas are
• What personas want

You can use this information for insights into what’s working and what’s not working.

Craft product and services for personas

Use the above information to create a list of ways your content or product development can address objections.

Now you know what works with personas to develop these strategies further.

And also knowing what doesn’t work, can help change strategies or concentrate efforts on what’s working.

This helps everyone in your company focus on the same strategies when it comes to leads and customers.

Researching Buyer Personas

Before creating your buyer personas, you need information on buyer personas.

To do that, use these following sources:

Current customers

Start with existing customers or visitors because they’ve already engaged with your company.

And some will model target personas.

Use comments and feedback from people who love your product or content.

But unhappy customers or visitors will help form your personas.

From feedback, they may find your product too technical and difficult to use or your content boring without images and videos.

You learn about your product or content and customers’ challenges.

Customers often like being heard and visitors like their feedback implemented.

This gives them a chance to tell you about:

• Challenges
• What they think of your product or content

Customers and visitors like having an impact on the products and content they use and consume.

Showing you take their feedback and input into consideration makes them loyal to your company.

Forums

If you don’t have a current customer base or not enough feedback from website visitors.

Go to forums such as Reddit and Quora.

Look up threads under your topic of research and read through conversations between contributors.

Use this data to build your target personas:

• Problems
• Likes
• Dislikes

Social channels

If you’re going into new markets or don’t have any leads or customers yet.

Use social media channels.

Go to groups or pages related to your company’s niches, even competitor pages.

Go through the interactions by contributors and the comment sections.

It may be hard to get a large volume of information this way, but you’ll get high-quality data.

For example, search on LinkedIn for people or groups who fit your target personas and results with connections in common with you.

Even reach out to connections or start contributing and asking questions in groups and comment sections.

Review mining

Again if you don’t have customers or visitors yet, use Amazon for valuable data.

This method is used by copywriters to get inspiration to write sales copy but is also useful to find potential customers and visitors problems.

Simply go to Amazon, search for a book on your content topic or a product similar to what you sell, even a competitor product will do.

Now scroll down to the review section and read through all the feedback given by customers on the topic or product.

Here you will find reviews on problems people faced, how the book or product helped, what they liked and what they disliked.

All this data will help you better understand the personas you are yet to build.

Conclusion

Creating buyer personas helps understand your target customers deeper.

This helps you know:

• How to target prospects
• How to support current customers
• How to work with and listen to your customers

And this helps:

• Improve reach
• Boost conversions
• Increase loyalty

Now it’s over to you.

Tell me how this article helped?

How you build buyer personas.

And where do you gather your data from?

Let me know in the comment section below.