Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers based on data and research. Ideally, they will help you focus your time on qualified prospects, guide product development to suit the needs of your target customers, and align all work across your organization. Identifying your buyer persona will attract high-value visitors, help you generate more leads, and attract customers to your business who will most likely become your loyal customers. It will also allow you to drive content creation, product development, sales follow-up, and customer acquisition and retention.
Creating a buyer persona is important for your business. But the question is, how do you create one?
There are a lot of ways on how to create a buyer persona. You can do research, surveys, and interviews of customers, prospects, and those people outside your database who might align with your target audience.
Data gathering is very important in creating your buyer persona. You can do this in many ways. First, you can look through your contacts database to uncover trends about how certain leads or customers find and consume content. You can also create forms where customers can fill out on your website. Or you can ask for feedback from customers.
You need to find patterns and commonalities from the data coming up with a buyer persona from that. After data gathering, here are the next steps on how to create a detailed buyer persona:
- Fill in your persona’s basic demographic information.
Prepare demographic-based questions over the phone, in person, or through online surveys. You just have to be ready for rejection since most people are not comfortable disclosing personal information like this.
Aside from that, you can also include some descriptive buzzwords and mannerisms of your persona that you may have picked up on during your conversation, so it is easier for people on your team to identify certain persona traits.
- Share what you have learned about your persona’s motivations.
You need to ask the “why” during your interviews. What keeps your persona up at night? Who do they want to be? Ask these types of questions and tie that all together by telling people how your company helps them.
- Help your sales team prepare for conversations with your persona.
You can include verbatim comments from your interviews that exemplify what your personas are concerned about, who they are, and what they want. Then, create a list of the objections they might raise so your sales team is prepared to address those types of conversations with your prospects.
- Craft messaging for your persona.
Tell people about your products or services that align with your persona. Include the usual words you use, as well as a more general elevator pitch that positions your solution in a way that resonates with your persona. Using this strategy will help you ensure that everyone in your company is speaking the same language when they are having conversations with potential leads and customers. You should also create a name for your persona so everyone can internally refer to each persona the same way, allowing for cross-team consistency.
