Steps for Creating a Buyer Persona
What is a buyer persona? Simply put a buyer persona represents your company’s ideal buyer. The process of creating a customer persona consists of defining a number of characteristics such as professional role, demographic, behaviours, interests, and responsibilities. You may also give your customer persona a fictional name as an easy way to identify, relate to, and target prospects that fit the profile.
Define the Traits
Regardless of how many different varieties of customer types your business has, start by thinking about what your perfect customer looks like.
How do you do this? Start by evaluating who your product or service is designed for. The traits of your ideal buyers should define things like age, gender, interests, goals and challenges.
Gather Information
What are the common demographics or job roles shared by your current customers? Review your current customer data. Do your current customer personas reflect common traits as well as lead sources, since knowing common lead sources is also useful for future marketing.
Customer relationship management is an excellent place to store and organise customer information. Some CRMs, such as Capsule not only allow you to store information about customers and leads but use tagging features to indicate a trait of that lead, such as interest or behaviour. This makes it easier in step three to segment customers into personas based on that information.
Segmentation
Based on the shared traits of your ideal customer and the data about your current customers, now it’s time to start segmenting your company’s customer profiles based on their attributes.
For example, you may find patterns showing that customers of a certain age make up a large portion of your revenue and the majority of that group are women of 30-35 age groups. You will need two segments; one for all customers aged 24 to 45 and one for women aged 30-35 with women aged 30-35 falling into both categories.
Build your Buyer Persona
Let’s get started. You have segments based on customer similarities; so let’s create that unique buyer persona. When creating each profile, add all of the relevant attributes that make up the ideal customer.
Very few companies have only one ideal customer, so most businesses will have multiple buyer personas showing their most common buyer types.
Conclusion
Buyer Personas are the foundation of your marketing efforts. Without them, it’s almost impossible to know how to message your product to talk to customers’ pain points and needs, or how to reach them to build awareness and drive them to your website.
Take the time to do the research and build personas based on real customer insight, as it will pay off in the long run.