If you’ve ever given the absolute wrong gift to someone, you know how important it is to know your audience. Furthermore, if you’ve ever been given a terrible present, you know what it feels like: it’s disappointing and a bit insulting.
When marketing to your customers, if you don’t understand who they really are and what they truly want, they’re likely to feel just as disappointed as you’d be receiving a cat sweater for your birthday when you own a dog. Creating buyer personas is the first step to understanding your audience so you can make more sales and close more deals.
Below, we’ll walk through how to develop a buyer persona and conduct buyer persona research so you know who your audience is and how best to market to them.
What are buyer personas?
Buyer personas are segmented descriptions of your target customers. These personas detail common character traits and demographics like:
- Income
- Age
- Education
- Favorite stores
- Internet habits
- Relationship status
Beyond the one-dimensional descriptions, though, buyer personas also dive into your customers’ pain points and needs. They should answer three questions:
- Whom are we targeting?
- Why should they care about our product or service?
- What’s relevant to their lifestyle?
Buyer personas really help you picture the people behind the data and develop strategies to speak directly to their needs. These personas help inform marketing strategies—everything from the tone used on your website to the copy used in your ads—and also guide the evolution of your products while helping to position them in the marketplace.
They’re also used by sales teams for prospecting and pitching the product the correct way, and they help generate higher-quality leads. Buyer personas are a vital component of the path-to-purchase—without knowing your customers, there’s no way your product will succeed in the market.
How to create buyer personas
1. Gather information
The first step to creating buyer personas is conducting buyer persona research to gather information and data points about your target customers to draw from. Get started with these methods.
Invest in market research and surveying
Your target customers will look similar to your current customers. So, to learn more about your current customers, survey them. You can either contract with a professional questionnaire company or develop your own, but either way, the information gleaned from your current customers will be invaluable in defining your buyer personas.
Pro tip: When asking your customers to answer a survey or questionnaire, always reward them—think gift cards, discounts, or free products. Not only will it incentivize more people to respond to the survey, but it will also yield more honest answers if your customers feel they’re being compensated for the answer.
Conduct personal interviews
There’s a reason companies invest huge amounts of money in focus groups: They work. Being face-to-face with a person yields insights that simply can’t be gleaned from surveys. You’ll be able to probe a bit deeper into questions and your customers may offer up information and perspectives you hadn’t yet considered.
Dig into the data
Data is currency for a reason: It gives factual information about customers. Sometimes your survey may yield one result while the data gleaned from cookies and your website analytics may give a different story. There are also dozens of people-based marketing tools that will guide you through gleaning information from both your current audience and from your target audience. Data is great for breaking assumptions and providing clear, quantitative information.
Ask your support team
Discuss customers with the people who interact with them the most. Consider surveying customer-facing support teams or having one-on-one conversations with them to discover insights into your current customers.
