Buyer Personas: Build clarity around your ideal customer
Don’t start speaking until you know who you’re speaking to.
Build a clearer picture of your ideal customer
If your marketing is aimed at everyone, chances are it’s not speaking clearly enough to anyone.
A buyer persona helps you focus on the customers most likely to need what you offer. It gives you a practical picture of who they are, what they’re trying to achieve, what gets in their way and what influences their buying decisions.
That gives you a much better basis for deciding what to say, what content to create, which channels to use and where to put your marketing budget.
Our Buyer Persona template takes you through the important questions, so you can build your persona around customer conversations, sales insight and data.
What to include in your buyer persona
- Start with who they are: Define the customer group you want to reach, including their role, industry or organisation type, organisation size and part in the buying decision.
- Understand what they’re trying to achieve: Look at their responsibilities, priorities and goals. What does success look like from their point of view?
- Find out what gets in their way: Identify their main challenges or frustrations, the impact those problems have and what they’re doing about them now.
- Understand how they make buying decisions: Consider what prompts them to look for a solution, what may delay a purchase, what they compare when choosing a supplier and who else has a say in the decision.
- Work out how to reach them: Find out where they go for information, how they prefer suppliers to communicate and which messages are most likely to matter. Pay attention to the words they use to describe their own needs. That language can be useful when you’re writing marketing and sales content.
Once you’ve completed your persona, keep using it. Refer back to it when you plan campaigns, create content, review sales material or introduce a new product or service. Review it as your customers and business change.
Buyer persona template
Not sure where to start? We’ve made it easy. Download our buyer persona template and work through the questions that will help you build a clear picture of the customer you want to reach, what matters to them and what influences their buying decisions.
