Buyer Persona Guide: How to Create and Use a Buyer Persona

A buyer persona is a fictional representative of the target customer base a company seeks to engage. Buyer personas feature an intersection of demographic information, including factors such as age, gender, race, income, family size and marital status, occupation and job title, political views, personal values, hobbies, and attitudes toward current trends. This information helps the company tailor their product and marketing to specific types of customers who fall within their target market. Companies develop buyer personas through data gathered from phone calls, questionnaires, sales metrics, and profiles of current customers.

Companies use detailed buyer personas to guide product development, sales, and marketing strategies.

1. 1. Product development: A company's product development team studies its best customers and attempts to create relevant content and product offerings that appeal to the people they already serve. They also use buyer persona research to anticipate what future customers may want.
2. 2. Marketing: Marketing teams use demographic data to craft a buyer persona template that will guide their content creation and messaging for content marketing. They use data to optimize their inbound marketing messages to reach the right types of customers.
3. 3. Sales: A company's sales team uses buyer personas to understand their target customers' needs or problems, also known as pain points. Sales teams also use buyer personas to better understand customers’ purchasing decision processes. Sales departments traditionally work with marketing departments to create buyer personas. This collaborative use of buyer personas can improve conversion rates for all of the company's marketing efforts.

In order to create a buyer persona to guide your customer outreach, focus on hard data rather than personal opinions or anecdotes.

1. 1. Define your sales goals. Part of establishing a buyer persona is deciding what you want to sell. Are you selling a new product or a company mainstay? Are you marketing one item or an entire brand?
2. 2. Learn from your customer base. If you have market research about your existing customer base, use it to craft the buyer persona of your ideal customer. Collect demographic data and use it to recognize patterns consistent across your most loyal customers.
3. 3. Study your rivals. If a competitor is already marketing a product similar to yours, take note of who they are marketing to and where they're trying to reach them. More than one company can serve the same buyer persona.
4. 4. Try A/B testing. In an A/B test, you randomly serve two different messages to a broad audience. Analyze the metrics of which message gets greater engagement; doing so may provide valuable information about your brand's core buyer persona.
5. 5. Consider where the product will be sold. Marketers evaluate the potential customers in their target market to determine the sort of retail business or Internet platform they’re most likely to shop at. The retail environment, whether in a physical store or via a website, will impact a potential customer's purchasing decisions and can reveal key insights into your ideal customer.

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