5 easy steps to creating buyer personas
If you’re seriously wanting to ramp up your online lead generation and grow your business to the next level then you will have been researching digital marketing automation and all that entails and you will now have noticed ‘buyer personas’ being mentioned frequently.
Let’s start with defining what a buyer persona is:
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. This character is based on real data you hold on existing customers as well as being based on market research.
The process of creating buyer personas for your business could actually be quite enlightening giving you great insight into your business. These personas will determine where to focus your time, guide product development and allow for alignment across your organisation enabling you to attract the most valuable visitors, leads and customers.
To help with this process we are sharing our top 5 tips to creating the most effective buyer personas for your business.
1. Determine what you want to know about your buyer persona
Before doing any market research and to avoid missing out any important elements of your personas, it’s important to make a list as a starting point. Here are some pieces of information you may want to include:
- Gender
- Age Range
- Geography
- Job Title
- Goals
- Concerns/roadblocks
- Potential Buying Motivation
- Income Level
- Relationship/family status
Of course it will vary depending on your business model and whether you are a targeting B2B or B2C business.
2. Drill Down to the Detail
The more specific your buyer persona, the more effective it is but in order to drill down to the detail you need to think of the bigger picture. Most businesses will have several buyer personas which will initially be grouped by their interest in a product or service. Then you can drill down to think of the different reasons why they want to buy from you and consider buying behaviours.
3. Use Your Website
Having a website that incorporates data capture forms is a great way to gather valuable information about your prospective customers. Also using interactive content or lead magnets offering value to your audience as well as helping you collect that all important information about your target audience.
4. Survey Your Audience
Your buyer personas will be hugely shaped by the behaviours of your existing customers. Don’t hesitate to survey your mailing lists to find out who they are and why they buy from you. Offering an incentive of some kind should ensure some engagement. This can also help you build up a profile on your ideal customers.
5. Humanise Your Persona
By now you should have lots of raw data relating to different buyer personas and their behaviours throughout the buyers journey. The next step is to bring this character to life by giving them a name and even a picture. This helps make each persona more relatable and easy to map into marketing activities.
As an example, our business has five personas for one of our service offerings – Cheryl the CEO, Mark the MD, Growth Gregor, Digital Dave and Marketing Mandy…more on that another time!
Make a Strong Investment in Your Buyer Personas
Creating buyer personas shouldn’t be viewed as a chore that needs to be done. Think of them as a great opportunity to really get to know your customers.
Investing time and resource to achieve accurate and relevant buyer personas and then using them in all areas of marketing activities will ensure you get the most value for your efforts in the long run.
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About Autus
Autus provide Revenue Growth Platforms, Marketing & Sales Automation and Digital Marketing services to help sales and marketing personnel and teams build efficient and effective sales and marketing best practices and automate their marketing and sales processes by leveraging personalised content, various digital marketing tactics, segmentation and behaviour of their prospects and customers.
Autus recommend various products for automation, such as Active Campaign, Hubspot, Mailchimp and SharpSpring…it will vary on your requirements and budget the best option for your business.
Find out more here.
Our founder, Tom Berry, also provides selective fractional CMO services and is a member of some client boards.
Let’s keep in touch!
If our team at Autus can help advise further, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our founder, Tom Berry.
