What if you could take your business to the next level with a single move?
In order for your company to reach its full potential, you need to know how to create the perfect buyer persona. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to create personas that are relevant to your specific demographic.
Wondering how to create a buyer persona you’ll actually use? Keep reading to discover the answer!
What Is a Buyer Persona?
The goal of our guide is to help you create a practical and relevant buyer persona. But we need to start by answering the basic question: what, exactly, is a buyer persona?
On the most basic level, a buyer persona is simply a very specific description of your target customers. Such personas help to gather important information such as hobbies, family size, and career fields in one place.
Furthermore, personas give you a chance to put names and faces to customer data that helps to make everything seem concrete instead of abstract. And this can be invaluable when it comes to maximizing the effectiveness of your sales and marketing teams.
Why Create Buyer Personas?
Now you know more about what buyer personas are. So let’s cut to the chase: why are these personas so important to a successful business?
One example is your marketing. The best marketing is very specific and speaks to the needs and desires of certain customers. By putting names and faces into analytics data, you can help your marketing team discover some dynamic new marketing techniques.
Similarly, these personas can be a real revelation for your sales team. A good persona gives a better idea of customers’ lifestyles and personalities, and this helps the sales team establish a working relationship and rapport that is necessary to foster sales.
Finally, a good persona is going to provide years of useful inspiration to your company. And while it can take a bit of work to get the persona set up, you’ll ultimately find that this time investment pays off in a big way.
The Basic Persona Template
The rest of our guide will give you a better idea of how to get all of the information you need to create an effective persona. However, we need to briefly review the kinds of information that form the heart of a good buyer persona template.
You’ll need demographic data for the specific persona. This may include details about their education, age, housing situation, social preferences, and any other info you deem relevant.
The template also needs an overview of this fictional persona that is based on real data. For example, we need to know the person’s name and a few sentences of light description. These overviews typically look like a brief description of someone you have recently met.
The rest of the template helps your team understand the priorities of the customer persona. For example, they need to know what challenges the person may be facing (such as the difficulty of finding a full-time job) and their biggest fears (which helps us to understand their motivations).
Finally, we need to know what their goal is. This information helps your sales and marketing team understand the long-term goals of the persona and develop strategies for how your products and services can move customers towards their goals.
Researching Your Customers
When you’re just looking at a good buyer persona template, it may seem straightforward. But don’t forget that the key ingredient to an effective template is effective consumer research.
We need to know things like persona gender, age, income, housing environment, and choice of hobbies. We also need to know about their education, current job, overall career goals, communication preferences, and any other pertinent info about their job.
Each persona is made to look like an individual person. But the data that powers these personas comes from your existing base of customers. And there are several different ways to achieve this key data.
The most basic way to get this information is to survey existing customers. Sending questionnaires out via e-mail and social media can help you gather a lot of data in a short period of time.
Of course, there are limits to how much you can discover based on questionnaires. That’s why it’s best to schedule one-on-one customer interviews and ask specific questions about goals, motivations, and pain points in their lives. While you’re at it, you should also schedule interviews with employees that meet the demographic criteria.
Finally, don’t forget to check your analytics data. Things like Google Analytics give you a virtually limitless amount of data about very important aspects of your customers.
Properly Segment Your Customers
As you well know, a consumer demographic is not an all-encompassing thing. In order for you to create the most accurate buyer personas, you must also be able to properly segment your customers.
For example, you might be tempted to think all of your customers are similar when you run a B2B company. But there is a world of difference between older, seasoned CEOs and young, hungry entrepreneurs who have created their first startup. By separating your demographics into specific groups, you can ensure that you give each segment of your customers the time and attention they deserve.
Depending on the amount of data and the variety of customers, you should be able to segment into two or more distinct groups. After that, it’s just a matter of creating three or more personas for each unique customer segment.
Professional Assistance
As we have detailed, it’s entirely possible for businesses to create buyer persona templates on their own. With that in mind, why do so many businesses struggle with creating personas?
The most basic answer is that there are so many moving parts to the process. It can be difficult to gather all of the relevant data. And even when you have data in hand, it can be difficult to translate the information into accurate buyer personas.
That’s when you should consider reaching out for professional assistance. A reliable third party with a history of customer success may be exactly what your business has been missing!
What’s Next?
Now you know why a buyer persona is so important to your business. But do you know who can help you get each persona “just right?”
Here at Gosling Media, we specialize in the creative content and marketing services your company has been missing. To see how we can transform your company, come see what we have to offer today!
