Buyer personas are depictions of your typical customers. Each buyer persona will include information on age, job title, pain points, obstacles, and priorities. The makeup of a buyer persona will vary from company to company, but it should all cover everything that may affect 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, buyer personas need to play a pivotal role in your strategy to market effectively.
In this article, we'll show you how to create buyer personas effectively and efficiently.
Segment your data into groups.
You have a head start if you have a CRM system with many contacts.
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 in their forties. As you separate common themes, you will 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
While this list will work for most buyer personas, the information you collect largely depends on your business, products or services, and customers!
Fill in the rest
You may consider customer interviews 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 significant information from data already in front of you.
Google Analytics
The 'Audience' feature in Google Analytics helps create buyer personas. It gives you insight into your website visitors, including their ages, sexes, interests, locations, and more.
Use the software to fill in key details across each buyer's persona.
You can also use Google Analytics to find information on common keywords and phrases your website visitors use. 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 Facebook's Business Manager. In addition to 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 help build your buyer personas. Make the most of forms by adding 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.
While extra data will be beneficial, be mindful of overdoing it when adding form fields. Visitors will be less inclined to fill out forms that are too lengthy.
Interviews
Interviews can be costly and long-winded, but they're the gold standard for gathering customer information.
You may choose to conduct customer interviews to supplement the information you have already gathered for your buyer personas.
As shown above, many options exist for creating buyer personas using already collected data. If you need 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.