How to Build Buyer Personas
Diona Kidd
Marketing Leader | Driving Growth & Sales Enablement | Industrial & B2B Marketing
It all starts here.
Everything. The products & services you offer. The tactics you use to communicate those offerings. Your growth strategy. Even your address. Everything your Inbound Marketing does is driven by the ideal customer you’re pursuing and building accurate buyer personas. But that’s why you’re in business, right? To serve, educate, and help that customer?
Since everything depends on attracting that customer to your brand and your website, it’s crucial to develop a deep understanding of his or her likes, dislikes, habits, and passions. While having a gut-feeling of these factors may be helpful, creating a researched and organized profile of this customer launches you out of the realm of the hypothetical into a data-driven reality. We call this profile a buyer persona – a fictionalized representation of your ideal customer. Creating one could change the way you do business.
Building Your Buyer Persona will:
- Give you a clear understanding of who your business is trying to reach.
- Provide new ideas for products and services with a greater chance of success.
- Help you to focus on opportunities that are aligned with your customers' wants/needs and eliminate those that are not.
- Allow you to delight your customers with a high level of personalized service.
How to Build a Buyer Persona
- Build a list to define your ideal customer. Consider the factors of gender, age, education, income-level, geographical location, interests, family, and pain points.
- Interview a few of your existing customers to gain a better understanding of their challenges, goals, and problems they're trying to solve.
- Research online. If you’re trying to reach a CMO at a medium size restaurant chain, take a look at the publications and associations she values.
- Compile this information into a simple, one-page document for your persona. Post this next to your computer or in a place you’ll see it every day. You’ll need it to direct your decision-making – both large and small.
- Keep the number of personas to a minimum. One to three is the most manageable way to start. Ten or more personas will destroy your focus. If you're building a new website or launching a redesign, focus on a few, then add more when your business is ready.
Now What?
Use the persona as a guide to creating engaging, attractive content. If you're considering a new product, does it relieve a pain point your customer may have? If you're designing a downloadable content offer for your website, does it educate your customer in an area he or she may be passionate about? With accurate buyer personas, your website content will allow you to attract attention from prospects who are looking for your products or services, and help you turn them into customers.
This article originally appeared on https://www.knowmad.com/blog/build-buyer-personas/
CMO + Executive Advisor | I help SaaS & SMB brands turn brand and marketing into measurable revenue growth | GTM Strategy & Execution | B2B and B2C
4 年This is one of my favorite parts of being a strategic marketer, and I often find this critical step overlooked. The research and interview part is especially important. There are two sides - what we know about our customers, and what we don't know that they help us learn! That's how you build a brand that matters. #personas #marketingeffectiveness
Assistant Controller at Solar Energy
4 年Very useful
I help home service professionals (like you!) get more leads, close more leads, and automate office work so you can spend more time with your family than you do with your customers.
4 年This is an essential but often overlooked process, because if you're selling to everyone, you're selling to no one. I use a very similar template that helps me clarify who my DREAM customers are: The people who LOVE your products and/or services, who come back often, and who rave about you to their friends and through social media. The more specific you can get, the better, including their age, how they identify, the specific books, magazines, and sites they read, where they hang out (online and IRL), what social organizations they belong to, what shows they watch, etc. I give my dream customer a name and find a photo of someone online that represents them so I can crystallize that person in my mind and so my team knows who to look for and where to find them. This is one of the most powerful tools I've used over the past 15+ years to grow multiple businesses. Diona's 5-step checklist to creating this buyer persona is a great template we can all use for both existing and new lines of business. Thanks, Diona!
Growth Consultant & Founder Community Media Network
4 年Interesting post. Have shared it in one of our groups. Will be great to have members like you in our network at: https://www.dhirubhai.net/groups/13500117/
CRM Marketing @ NBA | Membership | Digital Marketing | Data Analytics
4 年Thanks Diona. I like the idea of buyer personas in that on top of creating the relevant content on the websites, it can also inform advertising strategies such as Customer Targeting on Facebook