How to Create Buyer Personas
How to create buyer personas does not have to be complicated and offer many benefits. Creating buyer personas, or profiles of your typical customers, is key to segmenting your target market. Buyer personas are fictional representations of classes of customers, defined by shared demographics, interests, needs, and behaviors. They help identify the needs, characteristics, and desires of different prospect groups. This information is useful for marketing materials and ad campaigns. This information is useful when creating marketing materials or ad campaigns.
Why Create a Buyer Persona
Creating detailed buyer personas provides significant advantages for understanding customer motivations and guiding business decisions. Developing personas enables you to align your messaging, products, services and experiences to best resonate with target segments. This increases conversion rates and growth. Buyer personas also aid with developing empathy amongst employees to put the customer first. Additionally, they provide guidance on effective areas to invest resources. With buyer personas, teams can assess ideas or prioritize actions based on which segments offer the most potential. Their fictional nature makes discussing personas more comfortable than talking about data.
This article focuses on creating B2B personas. Buyer personas for B2B focus on a type of company rather than individual consumers (B2C personas). Here is a checklist for creating a B2B buyer persona:
- Include information on the persona’s industry, prospective company size, revenue, and other relevant business data. Keep details specific.
- Outline the corporate objectives, obstacles, and threats facing the company and how your product addresses these.
- Identify pain points and how your product alleviates them.
- Consider how the company makes decisions, what they value, and types of info that influence them.
- Determine what information will help convince them to buy from you.
You may need to profile specific decision-makers by title (e.g. someone in marketing, finance, owner). As you dive deeper into each area with research, interviews etc., additional checklist items may emerge that are unique to your audience segments. The goal is to build out an in-depth, multidimensional profile for each persona that feels realistic and provides strong guidance.
Using Personas Effectively
Personas are invaluable for creating targeted paid ads. They particularly help with keyword research for Google Ads and selecting LinkedIn target audiences. Personas guide choices on visual style and tone too. For example, financial companies may prefer more serious imagery.
Continuously update personas using new insight about buyers. Get the right number. While too many creates very narrow segmentation, too few leads to broad generalizations. Most B2B marketers create between four and six.
Pulling Your Persona Together
Thorough research demands time and money. Expect to invest anywhere from a couple $100 to a few thousand per persona when hiring market research agencies. Get sales teams involved in ongoing updates to control costs. Their interactions provide helpful customer knowledge.
Companies that understand their customers will have an edge over competitors. Use personas to differentiate. Try using SEMRush’s template to get started. Its free and can be shared with your team.
