How to Create Buyer Personas for Your Business

If you aren’t considering buyer personas in your landing pages, you could be missing a significant opportunity for customer engagement. A buyer persona is a fictional representation of the qualities of your ideal clients.

This definition includes basic information like demographics and job title, but it goes deeper than a simple customer profile by including wants, needs and business goals. Buyer personas paint a more complete portrait of ideal clients.

However, it’s easier to recognize the importance of buyer personas than it is to actually put them into practice.

Quality buyer personas can guide your content marketing efforts in the right direction. But too generic personas can result in lackluster content that doesn’t give website visitors a compelling reason to convert.

Here are some tips for maximizing the effectiveness of your buyer personas:

1. Account for the Changing Customer Journey

Many companies target multiple customer segments, which makes it more difficult to effectively engage with each group. To make things even more challenging, many business-to-business firms are discovering the sales journey is no longer linear, according to CMSWire.

Content marketing used to be primarily inward focused, centering on internal bench marking metrics. However, now content needs to take a more outward approach to be more aligned with the customer journey.

One of the first steps to defining authentic, accurate buyer personas is to carefully map a typical customer journey at your company. This may vary slightly for every segment you cater to, but it’s important to understand these distinctions to capture the right kind of leads.

This helps you pin down what kinds of information potential clients look for during each stage of the sales process.

2. Use Human Emotions

One of the biggest reasons buyer personas and content marketing in general can be weak is because they don’t include enough human emotion to be captivating.

Potential customers want to make a meaningful connection to your brand. If content is written with keywords in mind rather than the customer experience, it will most likely fail.

While B2B firms may think they are exempt from emotional brand storytelling, this form of content is more compelling than blog posts full of industry jargon. It really comes down to knowing what your ideal clients want.

3. Be flexible

The customer journey has evolved a great deal in a short amount of time, and it’s likely to continue to do so.

After establishing the criteria for your buyer personas, you need to regularly reassess the specifics to make sure they are still relevant and in line with your current target audience. This particularly true for new businesses, Shopify suggested.

4. Consider all the applicable information

A great deal of consideration and detail should go into buyer personas. Beyond job title, you need to determine the age, gender, location, education level, relationship status and personal interests of the persona.

One of the best ways to uncover this data is by surveying current clients. While this can help you identify similarities among your target audience, it also allows you to uncover their motivations for buying your product and concerns they may have had before making the decision.

This helps you expand on marketing successes in your future efforts.

If you are just starting your business, researching competitors’ customers is one way to create effective buyer personas of your own. Competing companies’ blogs and social media profiles can be a great source of information.

After thoroughly researching these various aspects of your target audience, you need to tie it all together to form one unified picture.

Are there any other characteristics that are important to define accurate buyer personas?