Who are your Buyer Personas?

Why Talk about Buyer Personas?
Buyer personas is a common phrase used within inbound business. A quick definition of a buyer persona is: buyer personas are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers.
Personas help us all — in marketing, sales, product, and services — internalize the ideal customer we’re trying to attract, and relate to our customers as real humans. Think about trying to create an email for a marketing campaign, or being on a sales call and not being able to picture who you are talking to. Being able to have a clear understanding and definition of who your buyer personas are allows you to drive content, product development (depending on your industry), sales interactions, and really anything that you do in relation to your potential customers and then customers.
Having a database full of contacts that you cannot define will not help drive success forward or your return on investment. If you want to dig in ldeeper on how buyer personas fit into each part of your business and the Growth Stack check out the full story here.
An example buyer personas
To help look at buyer personas and their helpfulness let’s walk through an example buyer personas together. Visual Creatives is a HubSpot customer and they built out their personas using the HubSpot Personas tools.

Inside Visual Creatives’ Buyer Persona
1) Semi-Fictional Character
Visual Creatives has indicated that their buyer persona is typically an agency owner or founder. They’ve created a generalisation of their ideal customer through analysing their most profitable and loyal customers.
2) Day in Their Life
By thinking about what a day in the life of your persona looks like, you can better understand their challenges and motives. Visual Creatives has done this really well and documented the fact that their persona is struggling for time throughout their day and typically finds the information they need on the web. That indicates that a company should communicate with an agency owner by creating easy-to-find, relevant, and educational content online, rather than by contacting them on the phone or through email.
3) Demographic & Biographic Behaviour
You can see that Visual Creatives has noted the typical age, income, education, and location of their buyer personas — this is the typical buyer persona demographic information marketers use (but it doesn’t have to be the only demographic information you use). Besides giving you a basic understanding of who your ideal customer is, it can be great to have for getting more specific in your advertising targeting.
4) Persona’s Goals
Visual Creatives has done a great job generalising the goals that many agency owners are striving to achieve for their agencies. Knowing your audience’s goals and aspirations is crucial — it helps you better cater your content, product, and services to help them achieve those goals.
5) Pain Points
In the Challenges section of Visual Creative’s persona, they indicate that their agency owner persona is working in the business rather than on the business. This is an issue that many business owners face and dream about being able to do. If Visual Creatives can show its persona how they will be able to make this dream come true, they’re going to generate more qualified leads and new customers.
6) Information Search Process
We touched upon this in point number two on “the day in the life” of a persona. However, if we look at this example in more detail, we can see the agency owner is on the phone all day long trying to generate more business. If Visual Creatives tried contacting their persona on the phone, they are going to irritate the persona by taking up valuable selling time — or might just reach their persona’s buyer persona.
It’s also important to note that the persona switches off in the evenings after being too busy to contact during business hours — this means that Visual Creatives needs to be very smart about when and how they contact their persona.
7) Type of Experience Desired
By knowing what your persona generally expects of you once you secure their business, you’ll better be able to attract and convert new clients. Visual Creatives know that they will be viewed as an extension to their client’s staff and so can position themselves this way to their leads during and after the sales process.
8) Common Objections
By analysing what the common objections leads have for not signing on the dotted line, you can better prepare a solution to counter them. This will be invaluable to your sales team.
9) Story Format
By writing the overview of your persona’s goals up in a story format, it is much easier for everyone in your organisation to think of them and remember their story when creating content or speaking to leads and customers on the phone.
10) Image
As a supplement to the point above, adding an image to your persona makes them more real to everyone within your organisation, making it easier to visualise that persona when they are having conversations or writing content for them.
With clear definition of their Buyer Persona they can move forward and be successful with sending personalized marketing and sales. If you are looking for a remaplte to help you build this out for your company, check out the HubSpot Buyer Persona template located here.
Don’t forget that next Thursday we will be continuing the story of Contacts: A Growth Stack and getting highly personal.
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Written by Courtney Sembler
Courtney hails from San Francisco, CA and moved to Boston, MA to work for HubSpot in 2015. She is an Inbound Professor on the HubSpot Academy Team dedicated to educating and inspiring people about contact management, lists, email, workflows/marketing automation and lead scoring. She is devoted to education, environmental programs and an avid Sports Fan (Go Niners).

