Buyer personas paint a picture of your different buyer groups, and are a crucial component of any organization. While they may seem gimmicky, a lot of research and data go into crafting these powerful strategies.
However, buyer personas shouldn’t be just another item to cross off your marketing checklist. Your brand’s buyer personas need to be living, breathing frameworks that guide your product, sales, and marketing decisions.
To create useful buyer personas that go beyond alliterative nicknames and stereotypical hobbies, you need data-backed research. With it, you’ll build buyer personas that help your brand attract and retain high-quality leads and customers.
In this article, I share my strategy for crafting valuable buyer personas that target the right leads for your brand.
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a representative example of your ideal customers. While they may look fictional, the best buyer personas are based on data-informed reality.
Your buyer persona represents the person your company wants to attract and convert to a customer. This could be a direct customer or the decision-maker at an organization. Your buyer persona may even be different from your current customers.
Adele Revella, the founder of the Buyer Persona Institute, defines buyer personas as:
“Much more than a one-dimensional profile of the people you need to influence, or a map of their journey, actionable buyer personas reveal insights about your buyers’ decisions — the specific attitudes, concerns, and criteria that drive prospective customers to choose you, your competitor, or the status quo.”
Both B2B and B2C companies employ buyer personas as valuable guides for marketing and sales messaging.
Note: Buyer personas may also be user personas, but they are not the same thing. While the former focuses on your ideal customers and those who will purchase from you, the latter is centered on your existing consumers and those who actually employ your product or service in the day-to-day.
The advantages of crafting buyer personas for your brand
Carefully constructing an informed buyer persona will yield abundant advantages for your brand.
Talking directly to one person is far more persuasive than trying to address 10. Buyer personas work in a similar fashion — they let you speak directly to your ideal customers, touching on their unique needs, motivations, and pain points.
Using buyer personas, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of who your ideal customers are, how they behave, and where their priorities lie. You’ll then be able to craft consistent sales and marketing messaging that resonates with these people. Plus, you can tailor your solutions and product marketing accordingly.
Buyer personas also help you identify which leads are worth pursuing by defining your ideal buyer, similar to an ideal customer profile (ICP). As such, your buyer personas can act as a pre-qualifier for leads, helping you determine which are most likely to convert and stay loyal.
Finally, crafting buyer personas can improve customer retention rates. They can guide you in creating content that attracts your ideal customers to your business. You can then adjust your offerings to suit these personas and ensure people stick around once they become users.
How to find your brand’s unique buyer persona
Creating buyer personas that deliver results is a detailed process. Rather than simply plucking fictitious characters out of thin air, you need to be strategic.
This guide details the seven steps to produce data-driven buyer personas that accurately portray your ideal audience so you can win their loyalty.
1) Conduct buyer research
Start by digging deep into your audience with buyer research. Find out what makes them tick by collecting as much information about them as you can.
You can conduct buyer research in a few ways, so be sure to include multiple methodologies in this stage. Independent research, surveys, interviews, and conversations all come in handy when creating buyer personas.
You can:
- Conduct interviews with customers and prospects
- Speak to sales and customer service teams
- Analyze customer data
- Develop market research surveys
- Expand website form fields to collect more customer data
Interview customers and prospects
The best way to build robust buyer personas is to talk to your customers and prospects. Reach out to existing customers to arrange informal interviews for research purposes. Explain that the interview isn’t for sales prospecting and, if possible, offer an incentive to encourage participation.
As for prospects, develop a pool of participants from email subscribers, social media followers, and contacts. You can also crowdsource through social media and public forums. Alternatively, hire a market research partner to help you find suitable candidates for buyer persona interviews.
Although you want to speak with as many people as possible when conducting interviews, aim for a minimum of 10 conversations. The more people you interview, the more data you’ll collect and the richer the insights you’ll gain.
Set a goal to speak with different customers at least once a week. This allows you to maintain a core understanding of your buyer’s motivations, needs, and challenges at all times so you can continually improve your startup sales process.
Speak to customer-facing teams
As well as interviewing customers and prospects, remember to talk to your customer-facing teams. Sales and customer service teams hold valuable insights into buyer behaviors; they can pick up on nuanced behaviors and actions that buyers may not even realize they’re doing.
Along with noticing the finer details, customer-facing teams can spot behavioral patterns between similar prospects. Sales and customer service teams may notice common motivations and challenges that frequently arise when talking to buyers. You can then use these insights to guide your buyer persona templates.
Analyze customer data
The best buyer personas are data-driven. While interviews provide qualitative data, your brand already holds a goldmine of quantitative data to power your buyer personas.
Dive into your CRM software to see what information you have on existing customers. Valuable data to collect for buyer personas includes industry, job title, purchase frequency, average spend, customer lifetime value, and more.
You may even consider downloading your recent support chat history or inbound tickets, and creating a word cloud to see what the most frequently mentioned words are. If your brand has effectively harnessed its CRM, you should have access to all the information you need to craft robust buyer personas.
Pair this CRM data with analytical website data, such as insights gleaned from Google Analytics, to learn how people interact with your brand website. From here, you can discover more about your buyers’ behaviors and their journey to becoming customers.
Develop market research surveys
Market research surveys are a valuable tool for building buyer personas. They’re an efficient way to gain insights from a large pool of customers and prospects without investing an overwhelming amount of time and resources.
Surveys can uncover potential behavior trends among buyers, which you can dig into more deeply with follow-up interviews. Combining surveys and interviews helps you gather buyer data quickly and efficiently.
Expand form fields to collect more information
Passively collect data by adding customer research questions to existing forms on your website.
Expanding website form fields to include persona-related questions is an effective method for gathering valuable buyer information. Example questions you could include in your forms are:
- What size is your company?
- What is your job title?
- Where did you hear about us?
- What problem are you hoping to solve?
Avoid overloading your website forms with consumer research questions. Be specific about the data you want to collect at this stage.
Relatedly, keep website forms as short as possible to increase uptake. I recommend adding only one or two questions to your form so it remains brief. You can always tailor the chosen question(s) according to the type of form.
Also, remember to include exit surveys in your strategy. They can trigger on your website or app upon account cancellation. These surveys provide an opportunity to find out what caused people to leave without converting. You can data gleaned from exit surveys to discover barriers to purchase for your buyer personas.
2) Ask the questions that matter
The basis of buyer personas is asking the right questions to discover who your ideal buyer is.
The questions you ask during the research phase are crucial to ensure your persona is an accurate reflection of your target audience. If you ask the wrong questions or fail to address the most important characteristics, you may miss out on valuable leads for your brand.
Go beyond demographics
Demographic questions rarely share anything of value about your buyers. While there are instances where this information is helpful — for example, brands aimed at women — overall, demographics are surface-level data points.
A great example of this is the Prince Charles versus Ozzy Ozbourne buyer persona. On a demographic level, they both look like the exact same buyer: They were born the same year and raised in England; both lived in castles; and both proved to be successful in business.
Yet, their goals, motivations, and challenges were miles apart.
If your buyer persona only focuses on demographics, you could end up targeting two entirely different people who don’t align with your brand.
Collecting demographic information can be useful, but it isn’t the most important to acquire.
The right questions to ask when building buyer personas
Focus on asking questions that put you in your buyers’ shoes and view their perspective.
These questions should include a mix of professional and personal questions to gain a well-rounded picture of your buyer personas.
Ask customers and prospects about their:
- Trusted online channels
- Budget
- Current job title and dream job
- Challenges they face in your industry
- Desired job-to-be-done by your company
- Motivation for looking into your company
- Alternatives they are considering
You only have a certain allotment of time, so be strategic and pre-qualify the questions you want to ask. Decide which ones will prove most valuable for building a strong buyer persona for your brand.
Personal inquiries relating to hobbies, interests, and personality characteristics show you how to connect with buyers on an individual level. Knowing where they hang out online reveals the channels you should prioritize as part of your marketing activity.
Meanwhile, professional questions let you understand the nuances of engaging these buyers from a business perspective. When asking these types of questions, be sure to ask about their responsibilities as a decision-maker or buyer (if any).
Business hierarchies can be complex, as the buyers, users, and decision-makers you interact with aren’t always the same individuals. So, it pays to understand the relationship between the buyer and the user or the buyer and the decision-maker. This knowledge will help you account for them in your marketing materials and targeting.
Customer surveys and interviews: How to get to know your customers better
3) Understand your buyers’ motivations
Pinpoint your buyers’ why — the problems they’re trying to solve, their motivations, and what they want to achieve.
Understanding the motivations behind your buyers’ decisions is indispensable for effectively tailoring your marketing, messaging, and offerings to your target segment. The more you know about your buyers’ motivations, the better you’ll be able to connect with them.
It pays to understand your brand’s motivations too — why you want to engage with these people and what outcome you’re trying to achieve. This is a great exercise to make sure you’re targeting the right people for your brand.
By understanding your buyers’ (and your brand’s) motivations, you can tailor your solutions to your buyers’ exact wants, needs, and challenges without compromising on your own goals.
4) Segment your buyer personas
Chances are you’ll have more than one buyer persona. Vet your initial research to produce segmented buyer personas.
Most brands have at least two buyer personas, with the sweet spot lying somewhere between two to five. You should have unique personas for each type of buyer you aim to attract but not so many that you dilute the efficacy of your targeting. Start small and gradually expand your personas over time.
Look for similarities between the customers and prospects you interviewed during the research phase. Group together related buyers to produce overarching categories (note that not everyone will fit perfectly into one segment; simply identify the key similarities they share).
You could segment your buyer personas by job title, industry, budget, or some other differentiating factor.
For some clients, I like to group buyers based on the main services they need from us. For others, I might also use roles, or main JTBD.
These overarching categories, or segments, will make up your top-level buyer personas.
Tip: Start with a few major buyer “buckets.” Don’t create so many personas that your team is spread thin trying to customize messaging to so many different profiles.
5) Understand how to talk to your buyer personas
Once you have your brand personas, dig deeper into the roles, goals, and challenges of each one. This helps you understand how best to speak to them.
The best way to determine the most effective communication style for each of your buyer personas is to focus on their motivations and challenges. With these insights, you’ll be able to develop the right marketing and sales messaging for your individual personas.
Analyze their role within the business to understand where they’re most likely to fit into the buyer journey. Categorize them into buyers, users, or decision-makers to help you create content that directly addresses their specific role, interests, and pain points. This information also allows your sales team to share relevant information with the right people.
Looking at your buyers’ goals will also uncover the marketing messaging and materials that’ll attract each persona. Buyers focused on improving their bottom line, for example, may respond better to case studies relating to the cost benefits of your product, while those interested in performance may prefer a live demo that showcases product features and uses.
I recommend sharing quotes from your initial interviews to provide your marketing team with concrete examples of what communication styles and methods are most effective with your buyers.
Based on initial conversations with prospects, you can also share a list of common blockers to teach your sales team how to address those challenges in conversations with potential buyers. This gives your sales team the opportunity to find viable solutions, which you can then produce and customize to help your buyers overcome their concerns.
Knowing how to connect with your buyer personas will help you construct compelling customer journeys based on the expected behaviors, motivations, and actions of your various buyers.
As an added bonus, you’ll also learn which channels you should double down on in your acquisition strategy.
6) Create buyer persona templates
With your research completed, it’s time to pull everything together into an easy-to-use, visual format. Build buyer persona templates that make it simple for anyone (not just your marketing team) to understand your buyers.
Many brands like to add a photograph or drawing of the fictional buyer in their templates so they’re more visual. However, it’s not necessary and could put you at risk of making decisions based on unconscious biases.
When creating your buyer persona templates, include sections for the following characteristics:
- Roles
- Responsibilities
- Relationships
- Trusted Channels
- Habits, Likes, and Dislikes
- Motivations
- Goals
- Aspirations
- Pain Points / Frustrations
- Blockers
Remember, demographic information won’t be the main guiding factor for your buyer persona. However, including this information could help your sales and marketing teams find common ground with buyers on a personal level.
Sharing the buyers’ decision-making or purchasing capabilities in their job information will also help your sales teams determine whether buyers will respond best to a top-down or bottom-up sales approach.
Motivations, goals, paint points, and barriers to purchase will all help your team prioritize the activities that’ll bring buyers closer to the point of purchase — turning buyers into qualified leads and, finally, loyal customers.
7) Share your brand’s buyer personas with the wider team
Armed with your finished product, you’re now ready to share your buyer personas with your wider team.
Instruct all teams on these personas — what they are and why they matter. Educating everyone in your company, not just sales and marketing, ensures trans-organizational knowledge of the target customer.
Team members can then keep this buyer in their minds when completing their work. Web development teams, for example, will know which systems, updates, and development tickets to prioritize based on which activity has the biggest impact on your buyer personas.
Go a step further by helping your teams understand how best to serve these buyers. Craft messaging based on how different teams may interact with each of the buyer personas to achieve the best result.
On a final note, I recommend giving each of your buyer personas a name based on their job-to-be-done, so your internal teams can refer to them the same way. This improves uptake and consistency across teams while reducing confusion.
Don’t give your personas names like “Marketing Molly” or “Accounting Amy” to prevent stereotypes and assumptions from creeping in. Your naming convention should make it clear what your buyer personas do, such as “The Growth Marketer” or “The Marketing Manager.”
Wrapping up — Create an effective buyer persona for your brand
Buyer personas are a valuable tool for equipping your sales, marketing, and broader teams with the knowledge to turn prospects into qualified leads.
Demographics can provide a glimpse into your customers’ lives, but they shouldn’t be the focal point of your personas. Hone in on your buyers’ goals, roles, and challenges to craft robust buyer personas that guide your product, sales, and marketing decisions.
Remember, the best personas are the ones founded on data-backed research of real humans. Apply your buyer personas in conjunction with ICPs and user personas to ensure your marketing strategy covers every stage of the marketing funnel.