Buyer Personas are essentially the personification of your perfect customer.
Not your existing customers, your perfect customer.
They are a mix of demographics (the who) and psycho-graphics (the why).
Understanding this allow you as a company picture your perfect customer and put yourself into their shoes for a moment to truly understand what is driving them, what they are interested in, what problems they need help with and more importantly what they are searching for on-line.
Most companies will have an understanding of who they want to sell to already, probably composed of job title, industry, company size - all demographics.
Most companies also probably can’t fully tell you what this guy’s day looks like, where he searches for information, what do they value most and potentially what are some common roadblocks or objections they might throw your way.
It’s this contextual information that allows inbound marketers to really understand their prospect and therefore allow them to craft meaningful content that they would be compelled to download, i.e. convert on as a lead.
Buyer Personas are also one of the most commonly overlooked aspects of inbound marketing strategy and in my book not emphasizing enough on Personas is a huge error in any inbound marketing plan.
Before you embark on any inbound marketing initiative I recommend you really invest the time in thinking about who your Primary Persona is.
It’s probably different from a lot of the leads you are already getting through your site.
In fact, if your sales guys are telling you that the leads they are getting are not decision makers, they aren’t talking to the people who write the cheque and they are spending too long on their sales cycle then your website and content is appealing to the wrong persona and you should address this as a priority. It could have dramatic effects on your deal velocity and lead flow.
To give you a help in developing these here are 5 Tips to Create your Buyer Personas
- Interview your customers.
Find out what their day looks like, what they are doing as part of their day job, where they are frustrated, what they like about your product or service. How they came across your company, where they do their research, do they use Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc., what do they like to download, i.e. eBooks, whitepapers, infographics etc. The goal here is to get a broader picture of who buys your product and what they are interested in.
- Look through your CRM database.
Try to find any trends that you haven’t seen before, is there a particular industry that jumps out -for example Government or Private, SME or Large Enterprise, is there a region that consumes your content more. You might be surprised what the demographics indicate.
- Talk to your sales guys.
These are the ones on the front line.
Ask them about the leads they are getting in now, are they matching expectations when they engage to try and kick off a sales cycle.
As above, if you are getting a lot of lower level, non-decision maker leads then this might not be an ideal situation and could be prolonging any deals and sales cycle velocity. Sales guys like money, anything that is going to help maximise that they should get behind.
- Send out surveys.
If you have a huge database of customers or prospects - use it.
Run a competition and create a survey with a mix of quantitative and qualitative questions and use the data to develop more insightful content. There is no better route to learn why people buy from you than asking them directly. Ultimately is going to make them more engaged customers and prospects with you and you are going to create more valuable content for their benefit.
- Think about who you don’t want to sell to.
This is a little bit more advanced but Negative Personas are useful here too.
An example, lets imagine you are selling software and your Primary Persona is Head of Sales. You sell to the Line of Business. Sometimes when you are in a sales cycle you might come up against some internal prospect push back from the local IT guy who doesn't want to bring on a cloud solution as it’s potentially going to reduce his role in managing the corporate infrastructure as the power is shifting to Line of Business. This IT guy is your negative Persona. Don’t create content for him/her. You need to develop a playbook on how to mitigate against him from the get go in your sales cycle also.
When you have a picture using the above, wrap it all up into a nice story of your persona, name him something fun and memorable, Owner Ollie & Marketing Mary are a couple that HubSpot use as an example and start creating content only for your Personas.
Ask yourself with every idea you come up with, would this persona like this content, would it draw them to our website?
If not, dump it, start again.