Tips for creating buyer personas

The importance of the buyer persona is evident but where do you start with building one?

Interview your existing customers

The best way to learn about your primary online buyer persona is to get the information directly from the source. See if you can host both one-to-one interviews as well as group interviews of customers. And I do mean the ones who use your products or services, and the ones who pay.

By conducting both types of interviews, you will be able to gather specific details about your customers and understand general sentiments.

Interview your colleagues

Interviewing your existing customers will take some planning, and setting up interviews with your colleagues usually is a more comfortable option to gather information. By looking at the different roles in your organisation that have external contact or interact with the existing customers, you will start to learn more valuable things about who is indeed going through your marketing and sales process.

The most critical advice, in the beginning, is that you stay close to all sales, service and after-sales colleagues.

• Your reps speak to prospects and customers every day. They are a wealth of knowledge when it comes to an understanding how it is to be your prospect or customer, and therefore who your ideal customer is and what they want and need from you and your company. They often have great insights into identifiers, objectives and challenges your prospects and customers would like to accomplish in their strategy.
• Lately, I have seen companies prioritising this who get invaluable input even to their R&D or product teams!
• The colleagues working in your support usually have yet another angle of what your prospects and customers are struggling with in terms of day-to-day pain points and challenges. To understand what your customers need help with and think about is the best input you can get for planning, creating and distributing your content.

Use your online data, create lists and conduct research

We usually start from a data perspective. Trough our online data we have access to fantastic data that our prospects and customers have provided us with using our online touch points. This information comes in the form of properties you’ve received via form submissions and engagements captured on your assets such as pages viewed, emails opened, and meetings booked.

The next step is to create lists of any information or engagements showed above. And we stimulate online visitors to download useful and relevant content in exchange for their data. And we craft content offers that attract a specific type of buyer to them. Based on the lists mentioned above, we find commonalities between our contacts, that we use this data to aid using our buyer persona research.

When we conduct research, we think of it as a search, and then we compile our findings and craft our personas. And we do segment our contacts and continuously provide them with stellar content and motivate them to be a customer.

I hope that you have found some guidance on how to create buyer personas. Just click below to download a buyer persona template.

You can also read this article in Swedish on Onlineguiden.