Let’s be honest. It’s impossible to hit a target if there is no target. This is why it’s so important to have a clear picture of your target audience, and that’s where buyer personas do the heavy lifting.
Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal clients based on existing clients and extensive market research. Ask any copywriter and they’ll tell you that it’s better to write to a single person than a group.
So how do you write to one person when you have a large audience? Segment your audience and create a single persona for each segment, or create a persona that characterizes your ideal customer. Each persona will paint a clear picture of an individual who represents the larger group.
How many buyer personas you need depends on the size of your business, the amount of products, and the number of markets you sell to. If this is your first time creating personas, start with a few. You can add more later. Here is a free video tutorial on creating buyer personas by our friend Kyle Jepson from HubSpot.
Let’s look at a buyer persona example: IT Isabelle. We added alliteration to make the name fun, but right away it alerts you to develop messaging towards somebody who is in IT. However, there is more to a persona than a name. (See the questions below to develop your personas.) Detailed information about your personas will help you create focused and effective campaigns, emails, social media messages, and landing pages — much more so than writing to “everybody.”
Buyer personas offer more than a way to target your messaging, they provide structure and context for your company. This makes it easier to:
√ map out content
√ allocate your team’s time and resources
. √ achieve alignment across your organization
With a deep understanding of your buyer personas, you will have an edge on content creation, product development, sales follow up, and anything else that relates to customer acquisition and retention.
HubSpot's free “Make My Persona” tool helps you create well-defined and fully-fleshed-out (pun intended) personas in a step-by-step process.
HubSpot even provides tips and explanations if you need help filling in the properties, and helps you identify important pieces of information that are often overlooked. For instance, your persona’s aptitude towards social media use.
If you are already on HubSpot, you can access the tool within your account and begin categorizing your contacts and targeting them.
Before you start creating your personas, you’ll need some information.
Start with these questions for a single buyer persona:
Here are more questions to help you develop your buyer personas.
Now the demographics:
Gathering information can be tedious, but it’s worth it because you will create a more accurate buyer persona. Here are five ways to get started:
Now it’s time to use your research to create your buyer personas. Within HubSpot, follow this path:
Settings --> properties --> search “persona” and select the persona property --> click “add new persona” and follow the steps.
If you are not yet on HubSpot, use this buyer persona tool and select “build my persona.”
You’ll be presented with a series of fields to complete including naming your persona. Some ideas: IT Isabelle, CFO Cathy, Strategic Sam.)
Give your persona a description that characterizes this specific audience segment. Under internal notes you will add some basic core information such as roles, goals and challenges.
You can add a short story about your persona. Try to dramatize the character a bit. Also include information about where they go for information, what they do in their free time, and what their hopes and dreams are. 🙂
The persona should be the hero of their own story.
After filling the fields, you can check the “Automatically create smart lists for this persona” checkbox at the bottom. This will target the segment in their e-mails, workflows, smart content, and more.
Click “Save” to create and save your new persona.
There you go! You can now start working on your personas, and begin personalizing your buyers’ journeys. Get a downloadable guide to create your buyer personas.