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Ultimate Guide to Creating Buyer Personas

Knowing how to create a buyer persona (AKA a marketing persona) is great for building an accurate picture of your target market and defining the tone and messaging you want to convey in your online content.

What does ‘buyer persona’ mean?

Why are buyer personas important?

  • They help keep all employees focused and centred on who it is their customers are.
  • When blog posts are created, each employee will have the same buyer personas in mind, and therefore you will have vital consistency across the whole business.
  • Customers are more inclined to go to companies they trust, which is where buyer personas come in. If you can understand the trials and tribulations experienced by your customers and offer a truly effective solution, they are much more likely to use you over your competitors.
  • When you truly understand your customers as people rather than sales stats, it shows in your marketing and advertisement campaigns. Buyers will immediately respond to that.

What are the benefits of buyer personas?

  • Creating buyer personas allows you to personalise your marketing campaigns more effectively – this means better quality leads that are more likely to progress through the buyer’s journey with your business.
  • Knowing what kind of people you’re targeting helps create a connection and allows you to target marketing campaigns specifically at those who would be interested.
  • Buyer personas help create consistency throughout the business, not just in terms of content but also between the sales and marketing teams.
  • Marketing needs to know what kind of language to use, what the persona would find useful, and how they’re most likely to look for answers to their questions.
  • Sales can then use the personas to target that content at the right people and the right time for it to be most effective.
  • Consistency improves efficiency; with more targeted content, it will be read by fewer people who aren’t looking to engage with you, and your teams will know who they’re writing for and why.
  • When you’re developing your services or products in the future, you can use buyer personas to do that in favour of the kind of people you’re looking to attract to your business.
  • Identifying negative personas, which is to say users who are unlikely to become customers, helps you to know what to avoid in your marketing campaigns.
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How to create a buyer persona

  • Use your data. Start with the data you already have stored within your customer database. Collect all the useable insights from your records, and this will give you a clearer picture of the types of people who convert. You could also supplement this data by sending out surveys to existing customers via email or even undertake market research and hold focus groups, either in person or on a video conference.
  • Explore your analytics data. Google Analytics can be a great source of information and, when utilised correctly, can give you some interesting insights. Investigate demographics such as location, age, interests, gender and buying behaviour and gather all of the relevant information into one place. There are several social analytics tools too. Facebook audience insights, for example, allows you to view aggregate details on your current customers. You can also analyse a broader market of potential customers, discovering insights such as relationship status, job role and household size.
  • Review your competition. Competitor analysis is commonplace in many research methods, and it’s still important to see what your competition is doing when it comes to buyer personas. Some questions to keep in mind when you are checking out the competition are as follows:
  • The goals you outline don’t always have to be related to the service or product you offer. Simply providing knowledge, reassurance, or expertise via inbound marketing can often help customers meet their end goals.
  • If you have a sales team, it’s essential to sit down and talk to them to understand the goals of your existing customers as they are the ones asking the important questions.
  • job title
  • family
  • relationship status
  • hobbies
  • interests
  • age
  • location
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B2C and B2B Customer Personas