If you wish to be successful with your inbound marketing campaign it is absolutely vital that you define who your ideal customer is before you even so much as spend a penny on marketing. This is known as developing the inbound marketing persona. It is this persona which is going to define which content you create, which social media networks you use to target your customers and, ideally, the methods that you use in order to ensure that your client continues to hang around your website and make that purchase.

Now, most marketers out there will dress up the idea of developing an inbound marketing persona as a really complex thing. It is not. In fact, it is ridiculously simple. You just have to follow a very set process, which we are going to outline on this page.

And so building on our 5 tips to create buyer personas piece, here’s how to develop inbound marketing personas with interviews once and for all.

Determining your buyer persona from your interviews

It is important that you do not have an image in your mind of who your ‘ideal customer’ is right at the start. It is going to be far easier to slide your inbound marketing around the customers that already come to you as opposed to coming up with a completely new campaign. So, do not try and force people into one answer or another. You will want to think about the following, at the minimum, although, the more you ask them, the better:

• Occupation: Where does your ideal buyer work? How much are they getting paid for that job? What hours do they tend to work? If you are planning a B2B campaign, you may even wish to ask about the decision maker when it comes to purchasing. All of this information is going to have an impact on where your campaigns should be targeted, where your ideal customer may be hanging out and at what times they may have the ability to open their email i.e. if your buyer persona works from 9am to 5pm, are you really going to send them an email at 2pm?
  
  
• Social networks and content digestion: Where does your ideal buyer go to network with their friends or to discuss their business (if you are planning a B2B campaign) Are there preferred blogs that they read?
  
  
• Age: This is, hopefully, fairly self-explanatory. However, you may want to ask about other aspects of their personal life. Is your inbound marketing persona married? Do they have children? How can you use this information to your advantage?
  
  
• Education: This will, of course, have an impact on how you market your service. A well-educated person may need different methods of inbound marketing than one who just left secondary school.

Once you have asked these questions and, ultimately, developed your ideal buyer persona, think about how you can incorporate this into your marketing campaign. Think about how you can share this information with the rest of your company and ask them to put it to use too. Try to come up with a couple of ideal buyer personas if you spot a few distinct trends, however, you should always have one main one.

Others methods of gathering information

The information that you need to develop your inbound marketing personas will come from a variety of different sources.

These can include (among others):

•          Lead intelligence;
•          Social media intelligence;
•          Website analytics;
•          Surveys;
•          Collaboration tools;
•          Interviews.

Some marketers will get in touch with the sales team of the company that they work for in order to find out information about which customers tend to come to the website. Other marketers will gather information from a website, perhaps in the way of a survey and some will simply interview current customers over the telephone.

If you do get in touch with current and past customers over the telephone, make sure you put the effort into not just talking to the good customers. Your ideal buyer persona will also come from the people who were reluctant to make a purchase from you or, if they did make a purchase, decide that they did not like it. This will enable you to determine who to exclude.

You should also gather information from the prospects who may not have made a purchase yet. Talk to them about why they chose you and whether they are going to work with you and, if not, why they are not going to make the purchase. This, again, will enable you to determine who you should be targeting and who you should not be targeting.

Basically, you will want to take a considered approach when understanding who the right people to interview are. Get an optimum selection of people if you wish to generate the best buyer persona possible.