Creating Killer Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are representations of your ideal customers. They help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) and make it easier for you to develop content tailored to the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of your ideal customers.

The best buyer personas are based on market research and insights you gather from your actual customer base (through surveys, interviews, etc).

Depending on your business, you could have as few as one or two personas or as many as 10 or 20.

Buyer Personas include:

Buyer personas are not:

While we develop a buyer persona that represents your ideal customer, we also develop a negative persona representing undesirable customers. Negative personas may include potential customers who are not economic buyers of your services.

How do you use buyer personas?

Buyer personas allow you to personalize or target your marketing for different segments of your audience. For example, instead of sending the same email to everyone in your database, you can segment by buyer persona and tailor your messaging according to what you know about each audience member.

How do you create buyer personas?

Gather information:
Ask your best customers either in person or over the phone what they like about your product or service.
Look through your contacts database to uncover trends about how certain seekers or customers find and consume your content.
Ask your sales and service team for feedback on the potential customers they are interacting with most.

Buyer Personas Example:

Background (job/family/career path/education)

Head of Human Resources
Worked at the same company for 10 years; worked her way up from HR Associate
Married with 2 children (10 and 8)

Demographics: M/F/Age/Income/Location

Skews female
Age 30-45
Dual HH Income: $140,000
Suburban

Identifiers: Demeanor/Communication preferences

Calm demeanor
Probably has an assistant screening calls
Asks to receive collateral mailed/printed

Goals: Primary goal, secondary goal

Keep employees happy and turnover low
Support legal and finance teams

Challenges: Primary challenge, secondary challenge

Getting everything done with a small staff
Rolling out changes to the entire company

What can we do? To help them achieve their goals and overcome their challenges

Make it easy to manage all employee data in one place
Integrate with legal and finance teams’ systems

Real quotes:About goals/challenges etc

“It’s been difficult getting company-wide adoption of new technologies in the past.”
“I don’t have time to train new employees on a million different databases and platforms.”
“I’ve had to deal with so many painful integrations with other departments’ databases and software.”

Common objections: Why wouldn’t they buy your product/service

I’m worried I’ll lose data transitioning to a new system.
I don’t want to have to train the entire company on how to use a new system.

Marketing message: How should you describe your solution to your persona?

Integrated HR Database Management

Elevator pitch: Sell your persona on your solution

We give you an intuitive database that integrates with your existing software and platforms, and lifetime training to help new employees get up to speed quickly.

By developing buyer personas, you focus on the objections and challenges that your target audience has. This allows you to clarify your marketing message and elevator pitch so you can more effectively communicate with prospective clients. To get started with your buyer personas and your digital marketing program, contact us today.

Creating Killer Buyer Personas