Post by account_disabled on Apr 30, 2024 4:03:32 GMT
This post was updated on april 27, 2020 to include new links to resources, including a more comprehensive and easy to use buyer personas template. Buyer personas are the foundation of a solid inbound marketing strategy. Understanding what buyer personas are and what personas your company should be targeting is a key first step to engaging with potential customers and attracting leads. So how do you create buyer personas? Glad you asked! We’ve got a simple, five-step guide to creating buyer personas and a free buyer persona template you can download here when you’re done reading this post. How to create buyer personas define your ideal customer start with what you know to define your personas do your research compile data build your buyer personas step 1: define your ideal customer the key to running any business is understanding who your target audience is. If you’re familiar with inbound marketing, you know segments of the target audience are referred to as buyer personas. To build your buyer personas, you’ll want to identify three to five segments of your audience. Focus on the types of customers you’d like to attract in the future—those ideal, right-fit customers.
Next, think about who your company interacts with throughout the sales process. Who makes the final decision to buy and is there an influential gatekeeper that you need to win over before a sale is successful? Are you selling directly to consumers? What types of Australia Email List people are buying your product now and who would you like to sell to? But what if you can’t whittle it down to five? If you’re working with a particularly wide target audience, this might seem difficult, but having too many buyer personas can put you in the position where you’ve over-segmented your audience, and generally all that does is create extra, unnecessary work. For example, your company sells construction tools to distributors, construction companies, and direct to consumers. You might sell to dozens of different kinds of construction companies who all look at themselves as unique, depending on size, location, and what they build. You might be tempted to create a different buyer persona for each type of company. Don’t. Your focus should be on creating personas based on their ultimate goals and how you sell to them. Don’t worry if you can’t decide on your buyer personas right away.
You can increase or pare down the number of hypothetical buyer personas as you go through the rest of the process. New call-to-action step 2: start with what you know to define your personas to obtain information about your buyer personas, you really need to talk to people who would fall into said personas and get some firsthand information. However, you probably already have a lot of useful information your team has gathered just by working with customers, so start with what you know. Look at your current customers and any feedback they’ve given—positive or negative. Comments about customer service or the buying experience can be incredibly helpful when it comes to nailing down your buyer personas’ motivations. What kind of questions are they asking about your products or services? Check out your website, email, and social analytics and look for trends. Are you only getting facebook likes when you post a certain type of content? Which types of emails are opened most often, and by whom? All this information can help you fill in where your buyer personas get their information, so you know where to target them in the future. Talk to the people who interact with your customers the most. Your sales representatives know what questions potential customers are asking and the main objections they hear when people are hesitant to buy. Common questions can be added to your buyer personas so you’re prepared to answer them in the future.