Crafting buyer personas requires donning your psychic hat. Or, if you prefer, your intuitive hat. It's about getting inside the target market's minds in a very personal and intricate way.
If you fail to get into the nitty-gritty details, your content will be too vague to make an impact and that causes prospective leads to look elsewhere.
12 Questions To Hone in on Your Buyer Personas
HubSpot tells us that creating too many buyer personas can be as dangerous as not creating any, so keep that in mind as you work. Group the personas that emerge based on how much they overlap, knowing that what appeals to one will also appeal to their next closest persona.
Wondering how to create buyer personas? Start with these 12 questions.
- What are their personal demographics? Personal demographics are important. In addition to helping you strike the right tone and voice, and to use relevant language and references, demographics also help to assess how much nurturing each persona requires since some need more nudging then others. Certain personas move through the funnel faster than others.
- What was their education/career path? If you're a B2B business, a personas educational and career path matters. Self-made professionals who got into management before a B.S. was required might view things differently than those who've risen high on the wave of a Harvard MBA.
- How many businesses or verticals do you serve? Typically, you'll want to create a persona for each different company, industry or vertical you serve so content and offers match their interests, needs and lingo.
- Are they managers, independents, owners? Smaller businesses may look more like one-man-bands while larger businesses have managers and teams that work as monarchies or a cooperatives. These relationships matter when developing content.
- How is their performance measured? Your data and analytics are critical to marketing and sales success. Prospects have their own work-related metrics that measure their performance. Equating yourself with this data provides greater understanding around what prospects need to do, prove or show as a measure of their own success.
- What does their day look like? From the time they leave their house (or not, if they work from home) a target persona navigates his/her own daily grinds. Learning the details yields valuable insight.
- What do they wish their day looked like? Number 6 is the reality, but it's nice to know the fantasy version too. Is there a way your products/services support that fantasy? If so, start strategizing around that.
- What are their biggest challenges? You've created products or services because they help buyers do something better. Identifying their challenges results in creative brainstorming around marketing tactics that honor those challenges and provide solutions.
- Where do they go to learn? When you learn where prospects and leads go to learn more, train more, or vent frustrations - it draws an automatic map of where your content needs to show up.
- What do they like to share or comment on? Similarly, identifying the type of content they like to share or comment on generates more engagement and action. Not only does this spread the buzz about your brand, it generates positive attention from Google.
- Which associations and networks to they participate in? Again, this tells you where your brand is more likely to attract attention and make itself known. Does it require more tradeshow or convention action? Or will it mean investing more into social networking platforms? Ask and you shall learn.
- How do they like to interact with vendors? Learning prospects' preferred methods of communication and engagement will determine how you allocate your inbound and outbound marketing budgets.
Not sure how to create buyer personas that really work? That's okay. We have a guide for that.
Our facts-based guide provides 100% tried-and-true methods for defining personas that will shape your content marketing in newer, deeper and more effective ways.
