How to Build Buyer Personas

It all starts here.

Everything. The products & services you offer. The tactics you use to communicate those offerings. Your growth strategy. Even your address. Everything your Inbound Marketing does is driven by the ideal customer you’re pursuing and building accurate buyer personas. But that’s why you’re in business, right? To serve, educate, and help that customer?

Since everything depends on attracting that customer to your brand and your website, it’s crucial to develop a deep understanding of his or her likes, dislikes, habits, and passions. While having a gut-feeling of these factors may be helpful, creating a researched and organized profile of this customer launches you out of the realm of the hypothetical into a data-driven reality. We call this profile a buyer persona – a fictionalized representation of your ideal customer. Creating one could change the way you do business.

Building Your Buyer Persona will:

• Give you a clear understanding of who your business is trying to reach.
• Provide new ideas for products and services with a greater chance of success.
• Help you to focus on opportunities that are aligned with your customers' wants/needs and eliminate those that are not.
• Allow you to delight your customers with a high level of personalized service.

How to Build a Buyer Persona

1. Build a list to define your ideal customer. Consider the factors of gender, age, education, income-level, geographical location, interests, family, and pain points.
2. Interview a few of your existing customers to gain a better understanding of their challenges, goals, and problems they're trying to solve.
3. Research online. If you’re trying to reach a CMO at a medium size restaurant chain, take a look at the publications and associations she values.
4. Compile this information into a simple, one-page document for your persona. Post this next to your computer or in a place you’ll see it every day. You’ll need it to direct your decision-making – both large and small.
5. At first, keep the number of personas to a minimum. One to three is the most manageable way to start. If your target market is B2B, create a persona for everyone involved in the decision making process.

Now What?

Download our B2B Buyer Template:

Use the persona as a guide to creating engaging, attractive content. If you're considering a new product, does it relieve a pain point your customer may have? If you're designing a downloadable content offer for your website, does it educate your customer in an area he or she may be passionate about? With accurate buyer personas, your website content will allow you to attract attention from prospects who are looking for your products or services, and help you turn them into customers.