How to build a buyer persona?
Feb 9, 2022 . 4 min read . 335 views
Marketing personas are built to remind the team of what market segment they are in and how the messaging might need to be changed/adapted based on that segment.
Remember marketing personas are different from design personas.
Marketing personas are a composite sketch and they should reflect a majority of the people that they are supposed to represent.
You can also look beyond the traditional buyers when creating the personas.
Examples:
- Detractors: People who can negatively influence or derail the purchase
- Influencers: People who can positively influence or accelerate the purchase
- Anti Personas: People who are not the right fit for the product
3 steps to create your buyer personas:
Step-1: Quantitative Analysis
- The objective here is to collect as much data as you can on your customers and try to find high-level and low-level trends.
- High-level trends such as instances of specific industries more inclined towards your product
- Low-level trends such as people at a certain role within these industries who buy your product
Step-2: Qualitative Analysis
- The objective here is to reach out to people you have identified from the previous step and interview them to collect more qualitative data.
A few questions to ask in persona interviews:
- What is your job role? Your title?
- How is your job measured?
- What does a typical day look like?
- What skills are required to do your job?
- What knowledge and tools do you use in your job?
- Who do you report to? Who reports to you?- In which industry or industries does your company work?
- What is the size of your company (revenue, employees)?- What are you responsible for?
- What are the main goals and KPIs of your role?
- What does it mean to be successful in your role?- What are your biggest challenges?
- What are the main frustrations and pain points in your role?- How do you learn new information for your job?
- What publications or blogs do you read?
- What associations and social networks do you participate in?- Describe your demographics (if possible, ask their age, whether they're married, and if they have children).
- Describe your educational background. - What level of education did you complete, which schools did you attend, and what did you study?
- Describe your career path. How did you end up where you are today?- How do you prefer to interact with vendors (e.g. email, phone, or in person)?
- Do you use the internet to research vendors or products? If yes, how do you search for information?
- Describe a recent purchase. Why did you consider a purchase, what was the evaluation process, and how did you decide to purchase that product or service?- What do you use our product to achieve?
- Please briefly describe how you were achieving this before you found our product? What were the problems associated with this method?
- What is the main benefit you get from using our product?
- What triggered you to seek out a solution like ours?
- What are the top 3 things you’re looking for in a product like ours?
- What does your buying cycle look like for a product like ours? And who’s involved?
- What was your biggest fear or concern about using our product? Was there anything that almost stopped you from signing up?- Follow up with why wherever applicable to go deeper. Step-3: Draft the personas
- The final step is to draft the personas based on the insights you got from the steps above.
Below is an example of a basic marketing persona template published by Hubspot.
Hubspot has a great tool that helps you build personas easily. You can try it out for your buyer personas here.