Knowing your buyers is a critical component of your marketing strategy. Not only will it help you create targeted marketing campaigns, buyer personas will also help you shorten the sales cycle, prioritize product features, build intelligent product offerings or bundles, improve the customer experience and increase customer retention.
But not all buyer personas are the same and in this blog, we touch on points to consider.
What is a buyer persona
A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer and is based on market research and data about your existing customers. The main reason to build buyer personas is to help you understand your prospects and customers and tailor all customer touchpoints and experiences to their needs.
Often organizations have to build multiple buyer personas, depending on the number of products and services that they offer and the complexity of their product offering.
How to use buyer profiles
Your buyer personas can be used in many ways, including for product management, sales and marketing activities.
Use of buyer personas in marketing
Using buyer personas effectively allows for more precise and impactful marketing tactics for improved traffic and lead generation, higher conversion rates, and improved customer satisfaction.
- Map out customer journey: Identify key touchpoints during your buyer’s journey-awareness, consideration, and decision-where they might interact with your brand. This includes digital, print and event channels.
- Targeted content creation: Create blogs, videos, infographics, and other content that addresses the specific pain points, interests, and needs of each persona.
- SEO and keyword research: Identify the keywords and phrases that is likely used by your personas and use these to improve search engine rankings of your content.
- Personalize messaging: To increase engagement, use vocabulary and tone in ads, emails and creatives that align with each persona’s needs and preferences.
- Segment email lists: Divide your email list based on different personas to send tailored emails.
- Personalize campaigns: Develop email campaigns with personalized subject lines and content to increase open rates and click-through rates.
- Select social media platforms: User personas to choose the right social media platform where your buyers are most active.
- Target ads: Use demographic and psychographic information to target your Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn ads.
Use of buyer personas in sales
Buyer profiles help sales teams personalize communication and follow-ups, qualify leads, tailor sales pitches, and enhance demos for a more efficient and successful sales process.
- Tailor messaging and storytelling: Craft emails, call scripts, and presentations that address each persona’s unique needs and pain points.
- Build stronger connections: Understanding the persona’s background, interests, and challenges to find common elements and trust with potential customers.
- Identify quality leads: Use profile information to score leads are identify which ones are more likely to convert so sales can spend time and resources on high-potential prospects.
- Tailor pitches: Understanding buyer motivations helps sales identify and highlight which product or service solves a persona’s specific problems.
- Understand common objections: Use buyer profiles to correctly address the concerns of each persona and increase the chances of closing deals.
- Tailor product demonstrations: Use the persona’s needs and use cases to build stories, showcase features and make the demo more impactful.
Use of buyer personas in product development
Buyer personas help product managers and product marketers ensure that the products or services being created align with the target audience’s needs, preferences, and behaviours.
- Build better products and services: User personas help to articulate the specific problems and challenges that existing and potential customers face and guide new product features, user stories, and product innovations that are likely to be well-received.
- Feature prioritization: Understanding your primary target users and markets can help the development team focus on building functionalities that provide the most value to users.
- Customer-centric approach: Personas help understand customer motivations, journeys and experiences, enabling you to provide better customer support and enhance the overall customer experience.
How to create a buyer persona
Determine who is buying
Start with deciding who are the decision makers, users and influencers in your industry that are making the decision.
If you are building profiles for existing products and services, you can work with your sales teams to identify the buyer categories and individuals you can interview who were involved in the buying decisions. Recruit recent buyers, new customers to your organization, and repeat customers so you get a more accurate picture of your buyers.
If you are launching a completely new product, you will need to conduct market research through focus groups, a market research company, industry organizations, or prospective customers, to name a few sources.
Develop your questionnaire
Build a list of the questions that will help you unearth the information you seek. The sections below provide a list of questions that you can ask, depending if you are offering a B2B or B2C product or service.
You will want to tailor your questions to your niche and not ask more than is required to be respectful to the person being interviewed.
Conduct and record interviews
Start making calls but remember to keep it casual and conversational. Aim for 30 minutes but leave a little time for free conversation where you may uncover some insights that you had not thought of. You will want to interview at least 10 buyers in each category.
Look for patterns
Once your interviews are complete, look for common themes and note the frequency with which different buyers mention a particular insight. This will tell you whether it is a real insight or an outlier (trait of a single buyer).
Build your profile
Collate the information and build a generalized view of your buyer. Below is an examples of what a buyer profile may look like.
Remember to update your buyer profiles!
Buyer personas may change as your products or the market changes. Treat these profiles as living documents that need to be reviewed at least every 12 months or when you have a change in your product, marketing or sales strategies.
Questions to ask for B2C buyer personas
Here are some questions to ask during buyer persona interviews for consumer products:
Demographic information
- Age: What is your age?
- Gender: What is your gender?
- Marital Status: Are you single, married, or in a relationship?
- Family Size: Do you have children? If so, how many and what are their ages?
- Education: What is your highest level of education?
- Occupation: What do you do for a living? What is your job title?
- Income: What is your household income?
- Location: Where do you live (city, state, country)?
Psychographic information
- Lifestyle: How do you spend your free time? What hobbies and interests do you have?
- Values and beliefs: What values and beliefs are important to you?
- Personality: How would you describe your personality? (e.g., introverted, extroverted, adventurous, cautious)
- Attitudes: What are your attitudes towards spending and saving money?
Behavioural information
- Buying habits: How do you prefer to shop (online, in-store, a mix of both)? How often do you make purchases in our product category?
- Decision-making process: What factors influence your purchase decisions (price, quality, brand reputation, convenience)?
- Product usage: How often do you use our product or service? How do you use it?
- Brand loyalty: Are you loyal to certain brands? Why or why not?
- Preferred channels: Which social media platforms and other digital channels do you use regularly?
Needs and pain points
- Challenges: What challenges or problems do you face that our product/service can solve?
- Needs: What needs or desires do you have that our product/service can fulfill?
- Frustrations: What frustrates you about current solutions or products in our category?
Goals and motivations
- Goals: What are your short-term and long-term goals related to our product/service category?
- Motivations: What motivates you to buy our product/service? (e.g., improving quality of life, saving time, achieving a specific result)
- Aspirations: What aspirations do you have for yourself and your family?
Media consumption
- Information sources: Where do you go to find information about products/services like ours? (e.g., search engines, social media, review sites)
- Content preferences: What type of content do you prefer to consume? (e.g., articles, videos, podcasts, infographics)
- Influencers: Are there specific influencers or thought leaders you follow and trust?
Questions to ask for B2B buyer personas
Here are some questions to ask during buyer persona interviews for commercial or enterprise products:
Demographic information
- Job title and role: What is your job title and role within the company?
- Industry: In which industry does your company operate?
- Company size: How many employees does your company have?
- Location: Where is your company located?
Professional information
- Marital status: Are you single, married, or in a relationship?
- Children: Do you have children? If yes, how many and what are their ages?
- Hobbies and interests: What are your hobbies and interests?
- Lifestyle: How do you spend your free time?
Business goals and challenges
- Objectives: What are your primary business objectives?
- Challenges: What are the biggest challenges you face in your role?
- KPIs: What key performance indicators (KPIs) do you use to measure success?
Buying behaviour
- Research process: How do you typically research new products or services for your business?
- Evaluation criteria: What criteria do you use to evaluate potential vendors?
- Decision factors: What factors influence your purchase decisions (e.g., price, quality, customer service)?
Pain points and needs
- Current solutions: What solutions are you currently using, and what do you like or dislike about them?
- Unmet needs: Are there any needs that your current solutions do not meet?
- Improvement areas: What improvements would you like to see in your products or services?
Information sources
- Preferred channels: Where do you go for information on new products or services (e.g., industry blogs, webinars, conferences)?
- Influential content: What types of content (case studies, whitepapers, reviews) do you find most helpful when making decisions?
- Trusted sources: Which industry experts or thought leaders do you trust?
Budgeting and buying process
- Budget: What is your budget for new products or services?
- Approval process: What is the process for getting purchases approved in your company?
- Purchase timeline: How long does it typically take for your company to make a purchasing decision?
Let’s build your buyer personas!
Are you looking to build profiles of your customers and users so you optimize your marketing and product development efforts? Let’s chat to see if we help you gain more insights into your customers.