Why do you need a buyer persona? Let’s consider this hypothetical situation.
Your boss tells you she picked you to represent the company in a fishing competition next weekend. It’s a huge deal, a matter of pride both for your boss personally and for the company since you’ll be up against contestants from your main business competitors. You’re excited and not overly worried; after all, you’re a pretty good fisherman and you’ve been fishing for years. You’re confident you can do a good job and represent the company.
You ask your boss for details: what are we trying to catch? Because, of course, you need to know what fish you’re after so you can choose the right rig, the right bait, the best place to look for the fish, and the best time to find them.
But your boss doesn’t have more details for you; you’re a fisherman, she says, just go out and catch some fish – you'll be great! You’re in a panic. What are you supposed to do? Try everything you’ve got, throw out dozens of lines, and stand around hoping something will bite? You need to know what you’re fishing for if you expect to beat your competition.
As the fisherman needs information about the fish, the marketer needs a clear picture of the target customers if he expects to reel them in. That’s where your buyer persona comes in.
Your buyer persona is a roadmap to understanding your prospective and existing customers better. It gives you a clear picture of their needs, wants, desires, and pain points; it tells you how, when, and where they consume content so you can meet them there and give them what they need.
Your buyer persona is the difference between tossing an empty hook into the ocean and casting a carefully baited line into a school of hungry fish. Now that you know why you need a buyer persona, it’s time to define exactly what one is and what it is not.
When you have a well-developed buyer persona, you have a valuable tool that tells you what your customers think and do when they identify a need or problem, what factors influence their decision-making process, what motivates them to take action, and what drives them to choose you – or one of your competitors – to resolve it.
One thing to keep in mind about buyer personas: while they are primarily a marketing tool, they are useful across your entire funnel strategy. Once you've developed a buyer persona, share it across your organization, especially sales and customer service, so your team is better acquainted with your ideal customer and how to best meet her needs.
Just as a buyer persona is an invaluable tool for helping you focus your marketing efforts, a negative (or exclusionary) buyer persona can be useful for helping you recognize and avoid the type of customers you don’t want to target. After all, some leads will never be a good fit for your business, so you shouldn’t waste time, effort, and money trying to attract them.
Some examples:
Of course you should always engage with any lead, even in your exclusionary bucket, who expresses interest in your brand, but you don’t want to devote too much energy into converting them.
There are basically four sources of information you can use to research your ideal customer: your CRM/contact database, looking for trends in how customers find you and interact with your web content; your sales team, asking for feedback on their interactions with your customers; website forms, where you collect data from leads; and surveys and interviews with customers and prospects. The last item, direct input from customers and potential customers, is your most important source of information in developing a buyer persona.
Your first source of potential interviewees should be your existing customers, and not just your happy, loyal ones. You want the input of your not-so-happy customers, too, because they will provide valuable input about challenges and pain points your customers face. Finally, you want input from prospects, people who have shown interest but have not yet bought from you.
You may also want to go outside your own target audience and reach out to professional networks and social media contacts; LinkedIn is a good source of referrals. Some marketers find using online tools like UserTesting provides useful insight as well, especially those working with startups and/or small customer bases.
Tips for approaching potential interviewees:
Aim for interviewing at least five people for each buyer persona you are developing, including one prospect and one “unhappy” customer.
RELATED: Learn how to keep your customers happy no matter their buyer persona.
Sample buyer persona questionnaire
After you collect demographic information such as age, marital status, children, and geographic location (if applicable), ask these questions to drill into key information for your buyer persona. B2C and B2B marketers can adjust the list to suit their business niche.
Think about your most recent purchase. Why did you decide to shop for this particular item, and where did you first learn about it? Explain your evaluation and decision-making process and why you bought this item over another option. Who else had input into the purchase decision – if anyone? Lastly, what was the most and least important factors that influenced your purchase?
Remember, it’s not enough to know what your customers are doing, you also want to know why, so ask follow-up questions to suss out a more complete picture.
TIP: Get more leads with buyer intent data, which can help amplify the effectiveness of your buyer persona and research.
After you’ve completed your interviews and combed through your CRM and other in-house resources, you’ll have compiled a lot of raw data. Look for trends and patterns in demographics, motivators, pain points, influencers, and so on.
Group it into the following categories:
As you comb through your data, you may find that more than one “ideal” customer emerges; at this point, focus on one primary persona and develop your secondary personas as needed. You’ll use this information to not only describe your fictional (but highly realistic) ideal buyer but to tell their story to give your persona three-dimensional context that goes beyond a list of facts and data.
Now you’re ready to tell the story, combining information from each of the six categories outlined above. Let’s imagine you own a chain of gyms and yoga studios with snack bars. We’ll call your ideal customer “Healthy Heather”.
Healthy Heather is 36 years old and has two children, 9-year-old Bryce and 6-year-old Ella. She and her husband Jason are both mid-level professionals and have been married for 12 years. While they aren’t spendthrifts, they do have disposable income and will spend more on things they consider important, such as organic food, exercise equipment, and personal development classes.
Healthy Heather is a social worker at a busy hospital; she works varied hours, is often on call, and is in stressful situations. She constantly checks her smartphone to stay on top of everything. Heather prefers to work out in the morning; she and Jason alternate taking the kids to school so she can exercise before work sometimes. Regardless of her schedule, she makes time to exercise every day, even weekends. Healthy Heather is active in her children’s school and her local community, and between her work and volunteer commitments, she frequently has 12-hour days.
Healthy Heather doesn’t have a set time for exercise; she has to fit it in where she can. She also doesn’t always have time to prepare and eat healthy, organic meals at work, but she won’t eat fast food or commercially frozen food. She likes working out in a class setting with other enthusiastic, fitness-minded people, but because of her schedule, she can’t commit to regular classes, so she often finds herself alone on a treadmill or elliptical, which she hates. She’d like to get more involved with yoga, but her schedule prevents her from taking classes.
Healthy Heather relies on information from professional journals and websites related to her job. She has a group of friends, including doctors and nurses, that she often asks for input and advice about her health and fitness. Healthy Heather keeps a profile on LinkedIn and occasionally checks Facebook, although she prefers to keep up with friends and family on Instagram. She likes to browse Pinterest for healthy recipe ideas.
Flexible class offerings and extended hours are most important to Heather, as well as the credentials of class instructors. She is willing to drive a little farther and pay a little more for classes that meet her needs.
Heather expects to find challenging and interesting classes whenever she has time to exercise; she doesn’t want to spend time by herself on a machine. She expects qualified instructors to help her improve her exercise habits, and looks forward to healthy, organic snacks and smoothies when she doesn’t have time for a meal after her workout.
This composite tells a story about your buyer persona and helps marketers sharpen their message, identify effective marketing channels, and anticipate obstacles and objections to conversion. It's a story you can share across your organization to help everyone better meet your customers' needs.
In this example, key takeaways might be:
Knowing how to create a buyer persona is the easy part; the challenge is actually walking through the steps to do it well. Once you do, however, you've laid the groundwork to a much more successful marketing strategy.
Now that you're able to develop an unmatched buyer persona, use our free checklist to mark off every step in the sales process to make sure you hit on all points to ensure you turn your prospects into customers.
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