The Buyer Persona

Build your Buyer Personas to understand what your customers want from you.

What are Buyer Personas?

A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer. It should be based on market research, data about your existing customers, and a few assumptions. Buyer Personas are designed to help you understand your audience so you can market to them more effectively.

We think that Buyer Personas are quite simply the most important first steps to build an effective marketing strategy.

If you spend the time to analyse the trends, behaviours and patterns amongst your audience, you can then create a marketing and sales strategy built around their issues, goals, challenges and ‘pain points’. You can then create content that’s customer oriented, creating marketing campaigns and content, you show your target audience you understand their business pains and problems encouraging them to engage further with your business.

Why are Buyer Personas so important?

Buyer personas are the vital first step in any marketing strategy. If you can engage with your potential customers in a relevant and contextual manner, you gain their trust and more importantly their interest in you as a potential supplier.

And that’s exactly why buyer personas are important.

How to start building your own Buyer Personas

The first step is to gather all the data you need about your buyer persona. Let’s say you tend to sell to the CEO of medium to large companies. Maybe you don’t need to worry about a specific industry. We recommend that the Marketing people do some intensive desk research on the problems and issues faced by the CEO. At the same time it would be worth gathering data from your sales people on what they’ve found either in the customer base and when they talk to prospective customers. It’s helpful when thinking about these things to have the Buyer Persona Template to hand.

The Buyer Persona template pages are below. We have used the CEO as an example below.

Step 1 – Who is your customer?

The first step is to find out more about the demographics of the role. A recent study by Egon Zhender showed that around 92% of CEOs are male, 53% of them are promoted from within, etc..etc..

This information is relatively straightforward to gather from the internet. If your sales people gather their own information you should be able to correlate the two sets of data.

Step 2- What are the goals and challenges of your customers?

This stuff is a little harder to get hold of, but it’s online if you’re prepared to spend the time. However, a few short conversations with your customer, as a research exercise will soon glean some powerful information about their goals, objectives and challenges. Then we can start to think about what we can do to help them solve the challenges.

Step 2- What are the goals and challenges of your customers?

Step 3 – Why should they do business with us?

If you gather some real quotes from the Buyer Persona and then extrapolate as to how you are able to help them, then very quickly you can answer questions like – is this really the person we should be targeting.

To download a Buyer Persona template then click here.