A Cheat Sheet For Creating Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are depictions of your typical customers. Each buyer persona will include information on areas such as age, job title, pain points, obstacles and priorities. The make-up of a buyer persona will vary from company to company, but they should all cover everything that may affect the customers' and prospects' decisions to purchase.

How important are buyer personas?

Creating buyer personas can seem like a long, tiresome job. We know how tempting it can be to try to make do without them. You know your business inside out; you're pretty sure you know who your customers are.

However, in order to market effectively, buyer personas need to play a pivotal role in your strategy.

In this article, we'll show you how to create buyer personas effectively and efficiently.

Segment your data into groups

If you have a CRM system with a large number of contacts, you've got yourself a head start.

Comb through your customer list and pick out common themes. Is there a common age range? Are they mostly male or female? What are their job titles?

There are likely to be multiple common themes. For example, you may have a large group of women in their twenties and another large group of women in their forties. As you separate common themes, you will begin to uncover individual buyer persona profiles.

Whilst there may be overlapping themes, you should find that you develop buyer persona profiles that are relatively distinct from one another.

Use a buyer persona template

Once you've got a few broad buyer persona profiles, you can use a template to fill in the details.

Excel or Google Sheets will work well for this. You should have a column for each buyer persona (Buyer Persona 1, Buyer Persona 2, Buyer Persona 3 etc.). You should have rows to collect the following data:

• Age
• Sex
• Location
• Job title
• Goals and challenges

Whilst this list will work for most buyer personas, the information you collect will largely depend on your business, your products or services and your customers!

Fill in the rest

You may consider customer interviews to be your main obstacle to creating buyer personas. They can require a lot of time and resources.

Whilst customer interviews are invaluable for creating buyer personas, you can make a good start without them. You should be able to pull a significant amount of information from data that's already right in front of you.

Google Analytics

The 'Audience' feature in Google Analytics is helpful for creating buyer personas. It gives you insight into your website visitors. This includes visitors' ages, sexes, interests, locations and more.

Spend some time using the software and use it to fill in some key details across each of your buyer personas.

You can also use Google Analytics to find information on common keywords and phrases used by your website visitors. This will help you understand your customers' and prospects' questions, queries and problems. Look for common themes and add any relevant information to your buyer personas.

Social media

You can explore your audience further using the Business Manager on Facebook. Alongside similar insights to Google Analytics, Facebook Business Manager also offers information on Facebook-specific behaviours and trends.

You will find information on the types of pages your followers are interested in, their political stances and more. This should help you form a well-rounded picture of your buyer personas.

Form fills

Forms can be utilised to help build up your buyer personas. Make the most of forms by adding in extra fields to gather more information.

You might choose to add some of the following fields:

• Job title/role
• Pain points
• Challenges

The information you choose to collect will depend heavily on your business, products and services.

Whilst extra data will be beneficial to you, be mindful of overdoing it when adding form fields. Visitors will be less inclined to fill out forms if they are too lengthy.

Interviews

Interviews can be costly and long-winded, but they're the gold standard when it comes to gathering information on your customers.

You may choose to carry out customer interviews to supplement the information you have already put together for your buyer personas.

As shown above, there are lots of options to create buyer personas using data that has already been collected for you. If you need any further information on buyer personas or want to know more about incorporating them into your marketing strategy, speak to one of us at Flowbird today.