Who are your customers?
Although you may have a broad target audience, creating buyer personas are essential for businesses so you can segment your target audience. Segmentation helps you deliver the right content to the right audience, which generates higher engagement and more leads.
What are buyer personas?
Buyer personas are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers. These personas should be research based. Buyer personas should include background information, demographics, identifiers, goals, etc. Buyer personas will help you understand your customers and what their needs are.
The strongest buyer personas are based on market research as well as on insights you gather from your actual customer base (through surveys, interviews, etc.). Depending on your business, you could have as few as one or two personas, or as many as 10 or 20. ( If you’re new to personas, start small! You can always develop more personas later if needed.)
What are negative personas?
Whereas a buyer persona is a representation of an ideal customer, a negative -- or “exclusionary” -- persona is a representation of who you don’t want as a customer.
This could include, for example, professionals who are too advanced for your product or service, students who are only engaging with your content for research/knowledge, or potential customers who are just too expensive to acquire (because of a low average sale price, their propensity to churn, or their unlikeliness to purchase again from your company.)
How can you use buyer personas?
Buyer personas will help you personalize your marketing to different segments of your target audience. By segmenting the market, you can tailor your messaging to these specific groups.
If you take the time to create negative personas, you’ll have the added advantage of being able to segment out the “bad apples” from the rest of your contacts, which can help you achieve a lower cost- per-lead and cost-per-customer (and see higher sales productivity).
Combining your buyer personas with the lifecycle stage will allow you to plan and create highly targeted content.
How do you create buyer personas?
To create buyer personas, you first need to do some research. To gather information you can conduct interviews, create forms, and analyze your contact database. We have created a customizable ebook that includes templates so you can create your own buyer personas.
This ebook includes tips and tricks for:
- Asking the right questions during your persona interviews and surveys
- Formatting your persona research in a compelling way
- Presenting your new, finalized buyer personas to your company
- Using your buyer personas for segmentation, content mapping, and lead nurturing
You can download the How to Create Buyer Persona ebook here:
Like what you see? Sign up for our newsletter!
Submit a Comment