How to build and use your buyer persona

Buyer personas paint a picture of the key traits of your audience members, as well as offer insight into what they’re doing as they consider your product or service.

Buyer personas can have a significant impact on how people inside your organization view your customers. Here’s what they do:

• Eliminate personal wish lists, giving stakeholders a reality-based foundation for discussing the critical features and product changes that matter most to customers.
• Give team members a consistent picture of the target audience.
• Allow you to walk through what-if scenarios that meet the needs of specific users, helping to avoid costly misfires and mistakes.
• Put a face on the customer base, fostering empathy and insight rather than preconceived thoughts and beliefs.

When building your own buyer persona, first write down the broad-brush vision you have of your customers – the picture you have in your collective head. Do a little poking around. Get some input from customer service, sales, marketing… even the folks in accounting.

From this process, you can develop broad buyer personas like “retail customer” and “wholesale customer.” Then, build upon and humanize these personas. Use qualitative and quantitative research to flesh them out, taking advantage of every resource available, such as:

In order to market to them, you’ll need to know how your customers consume information and add that info to your personas. For example, do they prefer to get info online or offline? How often do they access social networks (and which ones)? Who/what influences their content consumption? Whose advice do they trust or seek when evaluating information?

You can bet that many of your future customers will be a lot like your current customers. That’s why one of the most valuable sources of information for growth comes from interviewing existing customers about their needs and why they love your brand.

When you're taking notes on customer interviews, make sure that you aren't just taking down questions and answers verbatim.

Instead, focus on actively listening and contextualizing their answers into common use cases and problems. By documenting these broader themes in a template, you'll already have some key points carved out for when you start to build your actual personas.

Once you’ve finished your research, centralize your findings. As you delve into the interview data, ask the questions that will bring each persona to life:

• Who is this person? What demographic characteristics describe her?
• What are the specific objectives, responsibilities, and obstacles she encounters?
• What is her role in relation to my company’s buying cycle?
• What are her favorite ways to communicate, to make purchases, to interact?

Then it’s time to get down to the nitty gritty: Identify common facts about your buyers, and then funnel those facts into specific personas. You could end up with fleshed out versions of your original ideas, or you could discover new personas you didn’t know you were serving.

That’s the beauty of this process.

You want your buyer personas to include the most relevant data about your current and potential customers. So be sure to include facts such as their type of business, job title and functions, and their geographic location. But also look for subtle facts that can give your company an edge – anything that can help you develop competitively relevant products and marketing.

Keep in mind that buyer personas are fiction. It’s up to you to bring them to life. The more information your team has, the more likely you will be able to understand the people to whom you’re talking.

When you’re finished, you should have a great idea of who your customers are and how to best improve your offerings to them.

Here’s a best practices cheat sheet for buyer personas that you’ll actually use:

•   Whittle down the number of buyer personas: between 4 and 7 is usually a good range.
•   Post the personas where you and other stakeholders can see them (some companies keep them posted in the bathrooms!).
•   Get to know them. If you find yourself talking to them, wondering what you could do to help them, questioning how you can improve, that’s excellent. (If they start answering your questions, you might want to consider a little time off…)
• ⌛ Revisit your personas every once in a while. Make sure they still align with where your business and content marketing strategy are headed.

Without buyer personas, some in your organization will have gut feelings about the people you’re targeting. But without research-rooted personas, even the sage advisor on your team will still be throwing content darts at a very large board.

The same holds true for developing a customer journey. Sure, you can jump right over it and get your campaign launched — but you’ll be missing out on insights that might make the difference between wasting your budget and awesome ROI. Get a quick tutorial with our customer journey mapping play and discover the value of a rubber chicken!

With personas and a customer journey, you create alignment across the organization and rally all teams around a customer-centric vision. The results are useful product improvements, as well as messaging that’s clear, consistent across all channels, and effective in building a long-term preference for your brand.

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