What you need to know about buyer personas

Hey, Inbounders, have you created your buyer personas yet? Do you know what they are and why they’re important?

Before you throw your hands up in the air in frustration and defeat, read on for a little ‘Buyer Personas 101’ and a FREE buyer personas template download at the end of this article. We promise it will make creating your own buyer personas as quick and painless as possible!

Buyer personas. What are they again?

Simply put, buyer personas are who you imagine when you think of your ideal customers. They help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) better, and make it easier for you to tailor content to the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of different groups.

The strongest buyer personas are based on market research as well as on insights you gather from your actual customer base (through surveys, interviews, etc.). You could have as few as one or two buyer personas, or as many as 10 or 20, based on your business, budget, and goals.

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Remember our last blog post about inbound marketing? If you haven’t read it yet, now is probably a good time.

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So, what are buyer personas good for?

If you already know the basics of inbound, you know that you don’t want just any traffic to your site—you want the right traffic. You want the people who are most likely to become leads, and, ultimately, happy customers. Who are the “right” people? Your buyer personas!

At the most basic level, buyer personas allow you to personalize or target your marketing to different segments of your audience. For example, instead of sending the exact same lead nurturing emails to everyone in your database, you can segment by buyer persona and tailor your messaging according to what you know about those different personas.

How do you create buyer personas?

When creating buyer personas, set aside a good amount of time with your team to take a deep dive into the lives of your customers. Bring along any research you’ve gathered and brainstorm everything from background and demographics to goals and pain points for each buyer persona. (We like to use our chalkboard wall for this step, but use anything that works for you!) You really need to put yourself in each buyer persona’s shoes and look at your product or service from their perspective. It might be tough to take a cold, hard look at your business, but, trust us, this process is a crucial first step to getting more leads and converting these leads into customers. The best personas get to the very heart of why—or, perhaps, more importantly, why not—this person would purchase your product or service.

We’ve taken the guesswork out of creating buyer personas with our handy (free!) downloadable template. Just plug in the info that you’ve pulled together, select a stock photo to give your personas visual representation, create a clever, alliterative name (Hi, Sample Sally!) and you’re done!