Why Buyer Personas are Important and How You Can Create Your Own

Do you know exactly what your ideal customer looks like? You should! Building accurate and detailed buyer personas is key to running successful marketing campaigns for businesses in any industry. Learn more about why this tried-and-true marketing technique matters and how you can put it to work in your marketing initiatives.

Table of Contents

What Is a Buyer Persona?

Why Are Buyer Personas So Important?

Major Benefits of Creating Personas for Marketing

Who Should Use Personas?

How to Create a Persona

Using Your Buyer Personas for Better Marketing Campaigns

Reviewing and Improving Your Buyer Personas

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What Is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is an expanded profile of the type of person most likely to buy from your business. The persona includes details that are both demographic and psychographic. The person described in a buyer persona is completely fictional, but their attributes are based on real information about your customer base. The more closely a lead matches this profile, the more likely they are to convert and the more resources you should invest into securing their business.

Why Are Buyer Personas So Important?

Buyer personas provide a better understanding of what your customers are looking for, which helps you make the most of your marketing efforts. Highlighting the selling points that are most relevant to the market you want to reach forges an instant connection between your audience and your brand.

To further advance this goal, you can also create ‘negative personas’ or profiles of the types of leads you do not want to pursue. These may include:

• People whose budget is too small for your price point.
• People who love your brand but have no use for your product or service.
• People who consume your content to learn more about your industry.

Major Benefits of Creating Personas for Marketing

• Buyer Personas Help You Connect in The Right Place and at The Right Time. Aligning the timing and location of your content marketing with your audience’s preferences ensures that your leads hear your message.
• Personas Help You Develop Remarkable Content. Effective content marketing delivers the information a lead needs exactly when they need it. Personas provide the roadmap you need to make this type of content.
• Personas Help You Nurture Leads Appropriately Through Every Stage of Marketing. Each persona responds best to a different approach when moving through the buyer’s funnel. Knowing which to use will make your lead nurturing efforts more effective.
• Personas Help You Prioritize Leads. Not all leads are equally valuable. Personas help you determine which of your leads are most likely to become paying customers, allowing you to prioritize them in your marketing activities.
• Personas Help You Stand Out from Your Competition. The exceptional marketing and customer service that buyer personas allow you to provide will set you apart from other companies in your industry.

Who Should Use Personas?

Your marketing, sales, and support teams can all make use of buyer personas in different ways.

Sales teams

can use personas to quickly understand a lead’s needs and offer them relevant information on your product or service. This allows them to make the most of the limited time they have with each lead and win more sales as a result.

Support teams

can use a similar approach to deliver better customer service. By examining personas to determine what matters most to each type of customer, support personnel can serve each client quickly and effectively.

Marketing teams

have the most to gain from constructing personas, especially during the content development process. Focusing on creating content that helps solve the specific problems described in your persona profiles makes it easy for your leads to see the value in your product. Using language and phrasing that suits that cohort will make your case even more convincing.

You may discover that you need to adjust your personas to better describe the needs of the people buying from you. Your marketing agency can help you review your customer data, draw the necessary conclusions, and finalize your new personas. You can also tie personas to individualized KPIs to evaluate how well your marketing efforts are paying off.

How to Create a Persona

Creating effective buyer personas requires real-world data collected from real individuals in your customer base. Some of the specific data you might want to collect includes:

• Their age
• Their gender
• The company they work for
• Their title at work
• The challenges they face at work or in their lives (also called pain points)
• The media they typically consume
• Their consumption behaviour, preferences, and attitudes towards brands

You can acquire this information by:

• Looking Through Your Contact Database. You may discover some surprising trends in the information you already have on your customers.
• Interviewing Your Clients. Talking to your existing clients can help you discover what they like about your product and what problems it solves for them.
• Collecting Relevant Information Using Form Fields. If you want specific types of information (such as postal codes or job titles) on your leads, remember to include a field for it on your lead generation forms.
• Talking to Your Sales and Marketing Team. These people spend a lot of time interacting with your leads and can share any general observations they have made with you.
• Using Our Template to Compile Your Information. Our free PDF template gives you a standardized format for your final buyer persona profile.

Using Your Buyer Personas for Better Marketing Campaigns

There is a reason that buyer personas are standard tools of every marketing agency: they work! Buyer personas allow you to:

• Quickly Pivot to the Best Sales Pitch for Each Lead. If you know what type of lead you have in front of you and what they need from your product or service, you can tailor your marketing appropriately right from the start.
• Use Your CRM to Track Your Marketing Effectiveness. Recording the buyer persona of each lead in your CRM allows you to discover which persona is most lucrative for you and how best to reach the leads that fit it.
• Implement Custom Marketing Funnels for Each Persona. A marketing agency can help you set up your website to display specific content and calls to action based on a particular prospect’s buyer persona.
• Discover Your Ideal Marketing Channel Based on Persona Preferences. While a business targeting teenage customers might do well marketing on Snapchat or TikTok, a B2B business will need to focus on more formal channels like LinkedIn posts or a company blog.

Reviewing and Improving Your Buyer Personas

Your company is constantly evolving, and your buyer personas must change alongside it. Remember to review and update your personas when the situation calls for it, such as:

• After your company changes its products or services
• When your business is involved in a merger or buyout
• When you want to take things in a different direction

A digital marketing agency can help you redefine your buyer personas after a significant change.

Start Creating High-Performing Buyer Personas Today

Effective marketing must be targeted at the right audience. Buyer personas are the tool you need to find your business’ best prospects.

As a top digital marketing agency in Toronto, WSI Comandix has played a pivotal role in shaping buyer personas for thousands of GTA businesses. Download our buyer persona template PDF or sign up for our email program and start building the personas that will solidify your customer base in the years to come.

Also Read:

• What A Digital Marketing Agency Can Do for You
• How Digital Marketing Works: What You Should Know

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