How to Create Buyer Personas – four tips

Creating Buyer Personas – Four Tips

One of the key challenges facing B2B marketers is understanding their buyers by creating buyer personas. Making it work remains elusive for many B2B marketers, as many feel their budget and commitment overall to create and maintain a buyer ‘persona’ consumes too many resources. Marketers need to overcome these concerns if they want to create effective marketing programs, whether it be for social media marketing, email marketing or traditional marketing, personas can help you build more effective campaigns.

What Are Buyer Personas?

Buyer personas are generalized characters that represent the various needs and goals of your real customers. It is a research project curated from interviews, observations, and industry trends to form your “ideal customer”. A few questions to consider are: What kind of content interests your customers? Where do they go for information? Personas are based on observations and measurement of customer insights and are the foundation for any successful marketing campaign.

Knowing how to develop buyer personas can be one of the most effective marketing techniques in your arsenal. Here are 4 tips to help keep you on the right track:

How to Create Buyer Personas

1. Focus on Motivation
   First, you need to identify the end goal your potential customers are attempting to achieve, what challenges they might be trying to solve in pursuit of that goal, and what tools they’re using to solve those problems. Second, and perhaps more importantly, you must identify the motives behind these specific behaviors. The more closely you can identify WHY a lead is conducting themselves in a particular way, the more effectively you can incorporate that into your buyer persona.
2. Keep Personas Fictional, yet Realistic
   When you develop a buyer persona, what you’re really doing is creating a fictional character. While a buyer persona is something that you build, you’re basing it on the attributes of real prospective customers. The trick here is to avoid describing the specific attributes of a single customer you know, instead painting a broad enough picture you can understand and relate to.
3. Choose One Targeted Persona
   Don’t dilute your strategy by trying to reach everyone at once. The most effective marketing techniques are the ones that maintain a targeted purpose. With that in mind, part of your lead generation strategy should be to create one primary persona that represents the people who will be most interested in you. 
4. Tell Your Persona’s Story
   Marketers often create a checklist when discussing the attributes of a buyer persona. A better approach would be to envision the day-to-day details of your persona’s life; you’ll gain more insight into their problem-solving and decision-making processes. The richer the persona, the more effective it will be.

Buyer personas are an important step in the lead generation process. Making these buyer personas work for your business goals is critical. Effective usage of buyer personas can aid your marketing effort, which can turn leads into customers.