Every business needs to know their buyer personas and they need to know alot about them.

Buyer personas are profiles representing your ideal customers based on data and research.

They are use to help:

  • Focus your time on qualified prospects
  • Develop products for your target customers
  • Make sure your organisation is on the same page

Doing so helps your business attract high-value visitors, leads and customers whilst retaining them over time.

Also understanding of your buyer personas will help with:

  • Content creation
  • Product development
  • Sales follow-up
  • Anything customer acquisition and retention related

And in order to create your buyer personas, market research and customer data is needed.

So in this blog post we will learn:

  • More about buyer personas
  • The different types of buyer personas
  • How to create your buyer personas

Let’s get started.

Why are buyer personas important to business?

Buyer personas are used to help businesses better understand their customers and potential customers. 

They are used to better cater to your target audience with:

  • Your content
  • Messaging
  • Product development
  • Services

And to fully understand your target buyers you need to at least know their needs, interests and background.

To know this it’s important to develop detailed personas for your business.

The best buyer personas are from market research and actual customer insights from surveys and interviews.

Depending on your business, you could have one to two personas or 10 to 20.

But start small and develop more personas later if needed.

Negative buyer personas

A buyer persona is about your ideal customer, a negative persona is about the people you don’t want as a customer, like:

  • Professionals too advanced for your product or service
  • Students using your content for research and knowledge
  • Potential customers too expensive to acquire

A few reasons why potential customers may be too expensive include:

  • A low average sale price
  • Their inclination to churn
  • They most likely won’t purchase again from you

Buyer personas in marketing

Buyer personas helps you:

  • Create content and messaging that appeals to your target audience
  • Target or personalise your marketing for different audience segments

For example, you can segment audiences by buyer persona and send them lead nurturing emails based on their personas.

Instead of sending the same messages to your whole customer database.

Plus you can take sales cycle stage information and combine it with buyer personas to create targeted content.

And creating negative personas gives you the advantage of segmenting bad contacts out from the rest.

This results in lower cost-per-lead, lower cost-per-customer and higher sales productivity.

Buyer Personas Types

Because each business is unique, their buyer personas are unique too.

That’s why finding and creating different buyer personas is a challenge.

And because buyer personas are unique for each company, the names are unique as well, like:

  • Customer personas
  • Marketing personas
  • Audience personas
  • Target personas

Each of these names have the same meaning but are unique to each company that named them.

Companies also have similar buyer persona categories like:

  • Marketer
  • HR rep
  • IT manager

But the number of personas your business has, no matter how different, depends on your target audience and what you offer them.

Persona Development

Before creating your buyer personas, picking the team who will develop them is important.

And this team should consist of customer-facing team members, one from each department.

Because each department will have unique experiences with customers which is valuable information when finding your target audience.

So when you are building your team, start with people from sales and marketing.

Because sales employees communicate directly with customers and marketing staff have data about your customers.

Also add an executive leader to make sure the brand’s mission and values are in every step of development.

So basically, your persona development teams needs members from:

  • Sales
  • Marketing
  • Executive members

While it comes to developing buyer personas, businesses need to review and update them which can be done annually.

This seems tedious but finding your target audience is one step closer to securing them as future and repeating customers.

Creating Buyer Personas

You can create buyer personas by researching, surveying and interviewing customers, prospects and those similar to your target audience.

You gather information to develop personas from:

  • Your contact database: How leads or customers find and consume your content
  • Form fields: Get persona information from your website like personas company size, if it varies
  • Sales team’s feedback: Information from leads like generalisations about the types of customers they serve
  • Interview customers and prospects: What they like about your product or service

Now after research, you’ll have raw data about potential and current customers.

Next, find patterns and commonalities in your research from the answers to interview questions.

Then use this information to develop one main persona to share with your company.

Doing so will give them an in-depth look into their target customer.

Persona’s basic demographic information

Start by asking demographic questions using:

  • The phone
  • In person
  • Online surveys

Make sure to note down descriptive buzzwords and mannerisms of personas that you’ve noticed during conversations.

This will help your team identify certain personas when talking to prospects.

Persona’s motivations

This is the information you learn when asking customers and prospects “why” during interviews, like:

  • What keeps persona up at night?
  • Who do they want to be?

This information can then be used to tell people how your company can help them.

Conversations with your persona

Add real quotes from interviews that highlight:

  • Personas concerns
  • Who they are
  • What they want

Then list objections that might come up so the sales team can address them during conversations with prospects.

Messaging for your persona

Teach people how products or services should be talked about with personas, like:

  • The vocabulary to use
  • An elevator pitch about your solution helping your personas

This makes sure everyone is on the same page when having conversations with leads and customers.

And don’t forget to give personas names, so everyone refers to each persona the same.

Finding Interviewees for Buyer Persona Research

When creating your buyer personas, find people to speak with to help understand your buyer personas.

Meaning conducting interviews to know what drives target audiences.

Use the following sources to find interviewees:

Your current customers

Start with your existing customer base because they have purchased your product and engaged with your company.

And some will match your target personas.

Not the ones who love your product but customers who are unhappy with your product because they will help you understand your personas.

For example, unhappy customers will tell you your product is too technical and difficult to use.

This will help you learn something about your product and customer challenges.

Current customers don’t need an incentive to do interviews, they just like being heard. 

So interviews allow them to tell you about their world, challenges and opinions about your product.

Also, customers like to influence the products they use.

So, involving them in an interview will make them more loyal to your company.

Just remember when reaching out to customers, tell them you want their feedback because it’s valuable to your team.

Your prospects

Make sure to interview those who haven’t purchased your product and know little about your brand.

So prospects and leads make good options for potential interviewees because you have their contact information already.

Remember to use their data to figure out who fits your target personas.

Your referrals

Talk to referrals who fit your target personas, especially if you’re targeting new markets or lack leads or customers.

Find people to interview by using your network, like:

  • Coworkers
  • Existing customers
  • Social media contacts

You might not get a lot of people like this but you will get high-quality interviews.

To start, searching on LinkedIn for people who fit your target personas and if they have connections in common with you.

Then, contact your common connections and ask for an introduction.

Third-party networks

To find interviewees not linked to your company, use third-party networks to recruit from.

With websites like Craigslist you can post ads for people interested in jobs and UserTesting.com to test remote users.

But UserTesting.com gives less control over sessions, but allows you to quickly recruit users for testing.

Interviewees Recruitment Tips

When reaching out to potential buyer persona interviewees, use the following ideas for a better response rate:

Incentives

You don’t need incentives for customers who want to talk to you.

So use them so people have a reason to be interviewed if you don’t have a relationship with them.

I’d suggest a simple gift card as an easy option.

This isn’t a sales call

It’s important to tell non-customers:

  • You’re doing research and want to learn from them
  • It won’t be a one-hour sales call
  • You want to learn about their lives, jobs and challenges

Say yes

Make it easier for your potential interviewee by suggesting a time but also being flexible.

Let them pick a time and send a calendar invitation with a reminder.

How many people to interview

For each persona you’re creating, start with three to five interviews.

Depending on how much you know about your persona.

Also do multiple interviews for each category of interviewees, like:

  • Customers
  • Prospects
  • People outside your company

And when you can predict what interviewees are going to say, stop.

Because you will start to see patterning during these interviews.

When that happens it means you’ve interviewed enough people.

Questions to ask interviewees

When creating your persona profile, ask different categories of questions interviews.

So, try these persona questions to ask in interviews:

Role

  • Your job role? Your title?
  • How is your job measured?
  • A typical day for you?
  • The skills your job needs?
  • Knowledge and tools used in your job?
  • Who do you report to? Who reports to you?

Company

  • Your company’s industry?
  • Your company’s size, like revenue, employees?

Goal

  • Your responsibilities?
  • Success in your role?

Challenge

  • Your biggest challenges?

Resource

  • How do you learn new information for your job?
  • The publications or blogs you read?
  • The associations and social networks you participate in?

Personal Background

  • Personal demographics, like age, marital status and children?
  • Educational background, like education level, schools attended and course studied?
  • Career path like how you ended up there?

Shopping

  • Preferred interactions with vendors, like email, phone, in-person?
  • Do you research vendors or products on the internet? If yes, how?
  • A recent purchase, like why you purchased, the evaluation process and how you decided to purchase?

Asking Why?

Your follow-up questions for every question listed above should be “why?”

Because you want to understand your customers or potential customers, like their:

  • Goals
  • Behaviours
  • Motivators

But remember people don’t always think about their behaviour to be able to tell you their motivations.

For example, the number of visits to their websites is a way to show their higher-ups they’re doing a good job.

So when asking about their biggest challenge, go deeper into that question to learn more about them.

Basically, you’ll learn more by asking “why?”

Conclusion

Start creating buyer personas to understand your target customers deeply.

And so everyone on your team knows how to better:

  • Target customers
  • Support customers
  • Work with customers

Which will improve:

  • Your reach
  • Boost conversions
  • Increase customer loyalty

Now it’s over to you.

Tell me the steps you take when creating your buyer personas?

Let me know in the comment section below.