Buyer Personas Demystified: 8 Simple Ideas to Create Audience Profiles

A quick Internet search on the topic of buyer personas will turn up numerous articles, how-to guides, and templates.  Some articles lead you to believe you only need to fill in a few boxes on a pretty chart to create a persona.  Others make you believe buyer personas are the magic bullet you’ve been looking for.  While there is a grain of truth in both statements, buyer personas do require teams to roll up their sleeves and dig into their data to realize the benefits.

To save you the hassle of scrolling through all those search results, here are some of the key tips to help you create effective buyer personas.

Buyer persona development is a team sport.

Persona projects typically start with the marketing team, but developing effective buyer personas also involves sales, customer support, and product development.  Including stakeholders from each of these areas will allow more insight into your ideal customer. Participation and alignment of these teams will also increase the adoption across the organization.

Start with what you know.

Gather insight on your active customers as a jumping-off point.  Web, search, and social analytics data can provide a wealth of information on the habits and sentiment of your customer base.  Review your marketing automation and CRM data to understand the demographics of your audience.  Last, conduct internal interviews with the customer stakeholders to identify the types of customers each area is focused on.  Collecting this information will begin to shape the true personas to create.

Size them up.

At this point, you might have identified numerous personas to develop.  Paring these down to the meaningful few that will be most impactful requires a prioritizing exercise.  Think about who holds the budget, who is involved in purchases, and how they fit into your target segment.

Another option is to assess your personas from a financial value perspective.  First, determine the average deal size to.  Second, estimate the number of individuals in the job role for your target market segment.  Third, weight the personas on the level of involvement they have in the buying process.

You might also consider the following factors when deciding which personas to develop:

• Is your sales strategy compatible with your persona?
• What level of sales enablement is needed for this persona?
• Can you easily identify the persona within your marketing database?

Survey says.

Leverage primary and secondary research to validate the insights you have gathered.  This information can fill in knowledge gaps or provide new aspects of the persona that you haven’t considered. Industry analyses, job postings, online communities, event attendance and customer surveys are all great sources of information.

Go to the source.

At this point, many organizations will decide they are ready to begin shaping their buyer personas.  Sometimes this is perfectly fine.  For organizations who are selling to a known audience, they may have enough information.

However, many thought leaders recommend conducting interviews with prospects and customers directly.  These discussions will provide additional context that cannot be gleaned from internal sources.  For organizations trying to engage unknown personas or enter new markets, this step is an absolute necessity.

Get creative.

Once you’ve completed your research, it’s time to pull out your template of choice and bring your buyer personas to life.  While it’s fun to give your personas quirky names and find stock photos, be sure you don’t lose sight of the goal.  To be an effective tool, ensure your finished persona addresses the following:

• Do you have a clear understanding of their job responsibility? What are their everyday tasks?  Where do they fit in the organization? What role does the persona play in the buying process?
• What keeps them up at night? What do they need to be successful at their job?  What is their underlying challenge?  What is the common jargon of their role/industry?
• What is the primary buying need? Is it solving an organizational problem, or a department or functional need?  What is the individual need based on the job role?  What is driving the purchase decision?
• What will effectively engage the buyer persona? What types of content do they prefer?  Where do they seek information?  What type of interactions do they prefer?

Don’t forget to validate.

Validating the persona is a crucial step in the process.  Gather internal and external feedback to ensure the insights gathered truly represent your buyer.  If something is off, go back to your research, or conduct a few more interviews.  The extra diligence will pay off in the long run.

Connect the dots.

The purpose of buyer personas is to become more audience-focused.  In addition to developing personas, documenting the buyer’s journey is another critical step to tailoring your marketing efforts to your audience.  Don’t just think about the digital journey – build in the sales touchpoints to better understand how the organization is engaging prospects throughout the sales process.

Once you have the buyer journey mapped, inventory your content to align it to your stages and personas.  Together, these frameworks will support your efforts to be more audience-centric and engaged with your buyers.

Buyer personas are valuable tools for any organization.  And as with all tools, quality matters.  Hopefully these steps have provided a better understanding of the development of effective personas.   If you have any advice or questions on the topic, we’d love to hear from you! Please comment below or contact us.