How to define your Buyer Persona in 5 steps?

Introduction

Buyer personas are a major component of any effective marketing strategy. The truth is, you need to know who you’re marketing to and who you’re selling to before you can close a sale. Today’s consumers only pay attention to marketing messages that are personalized and highly relevant to their unique experiences. Buyer personas are an essential way to meet this consumer need, while also streamlining your marketing and sales process so you only spend time on the prospects most likely to convert.

We can say the words “buyer persona” as many times as we want, but they won’t do much for you if you don’t know how to create or define one. That’s why I put together this step-by-step guide to defining your buyer persona. Here, you’ll learn exactly what a buyer persona is and how to define your own buyer personas in a clear, manageable way—step by step. Let’s get started.

What Is a Buyer Persona?

The first part of any good guide to defining your buyer persona should be a definition of what a buyer persona actually is. Buyer personas are an integral part of any strong marketing or sales plan.

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer or target audience. With a clear picture of who you’re marketing to, it becomes much easier to develop effective, targeted content that aligns with your ideal buyer’s goals and challenges.

Think of your buyers as a personal narrative. You’re building a story and context around the people who are most interested in your product or service. You want to learn as much as possible about them so you can deliver personalized service, relevant content, and helpful sales insights. Your buyer personas are the best place to organize all of that information into a story that will resonate with you and the rest of your team.

Why Are Buyer Personas Important for Your Business?

Buyer personas help you better understand your customers (and prospects). This makes it easier to tailor your content, messaging, product development, and services to meet the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of your target audience.

For example, you may know that your target buyers are caregivers—but do you know their specific needs and interests? What does your ideal buyer’s typical journey look like? To truly understand what motivates your best customers, it’s essential to develop detailed personas for your business.

The strongest personas are based on market research as well as insights you gather from your actual customer base (through surveys, interviews, and so on).

Depending on your business, you might have one or two personas—or as many as 10 or 20. But if you’re new to personas, start small: you can always build out more personas later if needed.

What Is a Negative Buyer Persona?

While a buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer, a negative—or “exclusion”—persona represents the type of person you don’t want as a customer.

For example, this might include professionals who are too advanced for your product or service, students who are only interested in your content for research or general knowledge, or potential customers who are simply too expensive to acquire (due to a low average sale price, a high likelihood of churn, or a low probability of buying from your business again).

How Can Buyer Personas Be Used in Marketing?

At the most basic level, developing personas allows you to create content and messaging that appeals to your target audience. It also enables you to target or personalize your marketing for different segments of your audience.

For example, instead of sending the same emails to everyone in your database, you can segment by buyer persona and tailor your message based on what you know about each persona.

In addition, when combined with the customer lifecycle stage (i.e., where someone is in your sales cycle), buyer personas also allow you to map out and create highly targeted content.

And if you take the time to create negative personas as well, you get the added benefit of being able to separate the “bad apples” from the rest of your contacts—which can help you lower your cost per lead and cost per customer, and ultimately drive better sales performance.

How to Create Your Buyer Persona in 5 Steps

Defining your buyer personas can feel like a heavy task. But if we break the process down into manageable steps, you can work through them one by one to develop thoughtful, in-depth buyer personas that will truly improve the way you market and sell. And don’t feel like you have to create all of your buyer personas at once—doing it step by step is a great way to make sure you cover all your bases without feeling overwhelmed.

This guide to defining your buyer persona is set up so you can step away and come back whenever it suits you. With that in mind, let’s move on to Step 1.

Step 01: Research Your Buyer Personas

All great personas start with a bit of research. Even if you feel you already have a pretty good idea of who most of your customers are, it’s worth taking a close look—not only at who you’re already working with, but also at who you’d like to work with in the future.

Who Buys From You?

It’s always easiest to start with what you know. Begin your research by looking at your existing customers. Here are a few questions to help you get started:

• Who in their company reached out to you first?
• Were they the final decision-maker?
• What does their job look like?
• Are they your company’s main point of contact?
• What are their roles at work?
• Do they manage people or processes?
• Do they report to a manager, or do they make most decisions themselves?
• What does their life look like at home?
• Do they have hobbies?
• How old are they?
• Are they married or single? Do they have children or not?
• Which social networks do they use?
• What problem are they facing? What is their pain point?
• What are their goals?
• What are their motivations?
• How do they buy?

These questions will help you get started (you can use the same approach in B2C and adapt it), but there are a few other tactics you may want to consider when conducting buyer persona research:

Talk to Customer-Facing Employees

Your account managers (or customer-facing teams) will have the best insight into your customers’ lives because they interact with them directly. Speak with the employees in your company who are in contact with customers to get a clearer picture of the people your business is already working with.

Talk to Your Customers

If it’s feasible, it’s also a great idea to speak with some of your existing customers. Consider sending a short survey to your key contacts, asking questions about themselves. You may need to offer a small incentive (such as a discount) to encourage them to complete it, but their answers will be worth their weight in gold. After all, the people who have already invested in your product or service are your ideal audience.

Who Would You Like as a Customer?

Once you’ve gathered as much information as possible about your existing customers, think about who you’d like to sell to in the future. Is there an ideal prospect your marketing and sales teams simply can’t convert? Maybe your competitors have had a lot of success in a specific market segment you’d also like to enter. To determine who you want as a customer, I suggest starting by taking a look at your competitors.

Where Is Your Competition Successful?

Are your competitors seeing a lot of success in a particular market segment you’d like to position yourself in? Check out their website. They’re likely creating content and sales offers that speak directly to that market. You can learn a lot about those ideal buyers you’re not reaching yet by seeing how your competitors do it.

Review Your Own Analytics

You won’t find more concrete data about your ideal buyers than what you can uncover through your own website analytics, social media insights, and online advertising campaigns. Look through each report and pay close attention to the demographics of the people clicking on your ads.

When reviewing your website analytics, see which pages your visitors view the most—and for the longest time. Are certain content offers downloaded more often than others? Who is downloading those offers? The answers to these questions provide valuable insights and data you need to compile relevant, effective buyer personas.

Step 02: Segment Your Buyer Personas

I’ll be honest—the research step is the longest one. Once you’ve handled that, feel free to step back and take a break. Set your research aside and let it sit for a while. When you come back, you’ll have everything you need to start writing your buyer personas.

Organize Your Information

Alright—now that you’re back refreshed and ready to keep working on these buyer personas, it’s time to organize all the research you’ve gathered. You’ve likely learned a lot about a variety of customers. Start looking for patterns in the goals and challenges you uncovered.

These similarities—what customers and prospects are looking for from your business or product—will help you group potential customers into distinct buyer persona sets.

Decide How Many Buyer Personas You’ll Have

Now that you’ve reviewed and organized your research, you can begin determining how many personas you’re actually going to define. It’s worth remembering you don’t have to cover everyone right away.

If you’re just starting with inbound marketing and buyer personas are new to you, it may make more sense to create personas only for the market segments you sell to the most. You can always add or refine buyer personas as you collect more information about your customers and prospects.

How you segment your personas depends entirely on you and your business. But if you’re not sure where to start, here are a few examples of how to segment your buyer personas:

• By industry
• By job title
• By age
• By family situation
• By social network
• By location
• …

Step 03: Create a Name and a Story for Your Buyer Persona

You’ve completed your research and decided which personas to start with. Pick one and start writing. Everyone writes differently, so do what works for you. I’ve always found it easier to build a broad picture of your buyer persona first, and then keep only the most important information for the final persona you’ll share with the rest of your team. Here’s what that process might look like:

Who Is Your Buyer Persona?

Start by giving your persona a name. The goal of defining buyer personas is to help you market and sell in a more personal way. Naming your buyer personas makes it feel more human. Once you have a name in mind, start writing down everything you discovered during your research.

• How old is your persona?
• What job title might they have?
• Where do they live?
• What hobbies do they have, and what do they like to do outside of work?
• Are they married or single? Do they have children or not?
• Which social networks do they use?
• What problem are they facing? What is their pain point?
• What are their goals?
• …

The answers to all these questions—and any others you can think of—help put your buyer persona’s goals and motivations into context. The better you understand what they want and why they want it, the better you’ll be able to engage with them in the future.

Give Yourself a Full Profile to Work With

When it comes to buyer personas, it’s always better to have more information. Challenge yourself to write freely. Set a timer for 15 to 20 minutes and jot down everything you know about this buyer persona. And don’t be afraid to get a little creative! People connect with stories—so the more real your buyer personas feel to your sales and marketing teams, the better they’ll be able to tailor their efforts to support your customers in real life.

So start writing and see how you can make it fun. You can always cut content later, but it’s helpful to let your creativity run and build a complete picture of this buyer persona. The more content you have, the easier the next step will be.

Step 04: Focus on Roles, Goals, and Challenges

Now we’re going to take a closer look at the narrative you just created and pull out the parts that will be most relevant for your sales and marketing teams moving forward. This information falls into three categories: roles, goals, and challenges.

Roles

You now have a complete picture of who your buyer persona is, what they do, and what they want. Review that narrative and pull out the information related to their “roles.”

This will include content relevant to their job title and responsibilities at work, of course—but it can also include their role at home or outside of work. Are they a regular volunteer? A parent? Do they manage people at work?

All of this information gives you context about who they are and tells your marketing and sales teams what they do. When you understand what someone does and the roles they play in their life, you can create content that speaks directly to those roles.

Goals

Understanding what your buyer personas want is key to providing marketing content and a sales experience that truly helps them. Maybe your buyer persona is looking for ways to improve their company’s profitability. Maybe their goal is to grow within the organization, and they’re trying to launch initiatives that showcase their leadership skills.

On the other hand, maybe your buyer persona is approaching retirement and simply wants to do a good job without rocking the boat until they can retire safely.

Pull out all the goals you identified during your free-writing exercise and organize them into a “Goals” section. Understanding a buyer’s goals is essential to delivering personalized, useful support. When your team understands what a persona is trying to achieve—even if it’s not directly related to what your business offers—they’ll be able to adapt their approach and strategies in a way that resonates with that persona.

Challenges

The “Challenges” section is the most important part of a buyer persona. This is where you identify each persona’s pain points. And when you understand your buyer’s pain points, you can work to solve them.

Look back at the long narrative you wrote for your buyer persona. What’s preventing them from reaching their goals? What parts of their job are difficult? Do they struggle to sell initiatives to their manager? Are they afraid to make big investments? Are they so busy that they don’t even have the time to consider how their business could improve?

Whatever their challenges are, this is where they belong. Also, take the time to be specific. The more challenges you can identify for each persona, the more opportunities you have to offer solutions. And the more solutions you offer, the more attractive—and useful—your business becomes to these qualified prospects.

Step 05: Use Your Buyer Personas to Build Tailored Marketing and Sales Strategies

When you know who your buyer personas are—and you understand their roles, goals, and challenges—you can develop sales and marketing strategies designed specifically for the people who are the best fit for your business. You went through the effort of creating these buyer personas—now it’s time to use them!

• Help your sales and marketing teams become familiar with each persona.
• Create ad campaigns that match each persona’s preferred platform.
• Develop content that addresses the specific problems and challenges identified in your personas.
• Review your existing content—does it speak to one or more of your personas? If not, make a few adjustments.
• Optimize your landing pages so they speak to your buyer personas, in their language.

Buyer personas give you a deep understanding of how your most qualified prospects think and operate. From their favorite social platforms to the way they talk about their career goals, you know a lot about these personas—and you can use that information to your advantage.

Create content these personas actually want to read, and build sales and marketing strategies that put your buyer personas’ goals and challenges front and center. When you write, market, and sell with real people—your most qualified prospects—in mind, you’ll start to see strong growth.

Example of a Buyer Persona

FAQ