How To Use Personas To Close Business

Something we recently did at Snipply was start the beginning stages of building out our user and customer personas. It doesn’t matter if you have a b2b business or b2c business, building out your customer personas is important. Personas help everyone from the top of the organization down to more junior employees whether they’re in marketing and sales or in product implementation and customer success.

They make sure that you are building out materials and processes that actually relate to your users and buyers, and make sure that all of your activities are aligned with your brand and company as a whole. If you don’t understand who your customer is then how do you create the right content, sales and marketing messages, and services for them?

So, what is a customer persona?

User Testing defines customer personas as the following:

A customer persona (also known as a buyer persona) is a semi-fictional archetype that represents the key traits of a large segment of your audience, based on the data you’ve collected from user research and web analytics. It gives you insight into what your prospective customers are thinking and doing as they weigh potential options that address the problem they want to solve.

I believe it is also important to have three distinct categories of personas.

1. Customers — This is simple. Customers are companies or people paying you for your product or services.
2. Users — Users are everyone else interacting directly with your brand. This can be individuals consuming content or interacting with your social media accounts, or businesses that could be potential partners and collaborators.
3. Negative Personas — These are people or companies that you don’t want to attract as a customer, or you know would never be a customer.

Now that we understand what personas are, how are they valuable?

Your personas will allow you to create appropriate content and messaging for the different segments of your target audience. Instead of sending out broad messaging for everyone you’ll be able to send different content, email campaigns, and social messages to your different personas.

When trying to move users from prospect to customer, you’ll be able to create the right content to get them to close. Negative personas will allow you to filter out those who aren’t true prospects from campaigns to focus on those that are high potential buyers.

Now let’s get to building them out.

When building out customer, user, and negative personas, you’ll want to try to understand the following:

1. Demographics — These are more quantitative or binary like age, race, ethnicity, gender, marital status, income, education, and employment
2. Psychographic Profile — These are personal characteristics like personality, values, opinions, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles
3. Professional Characteristics — These are qualitative characteristics such as motivators, willingness to learn, communication channels, etc.
4. Goals — These are both the individual and company-specific goals related to the individual or company interacting with your brand.
5. Challenges — These are the challenges in the way of your users’ ability to reach their goals.

If interested in seeing some examples you can see different types of personas here:

1. Venngage’s 20+ User Persona Examples, Templates and, Tips For Targeted Decision-Makin
2. L&T’s 10 Examples of Detailed Content Marketing Personas
3. Alexa Blog’s 10 Buyer Persona Examples to Help You Create Your Own

Answering these questions is a great way to start building your brand as a startup. Now beyond the exercise above, there are some other easy ways to gather basic data to influence your persona building:

1. Look at CRM data to uncover trends in who is becoming a buyer
2. Monitor your content performance in the different personas you hypothesize
3. Use social listening tactics to see who is engaging with your company on social media
4. Use forms and landing pages with critical persona information as form fields
5. Talk to your sales team and get feedback from their conversations with different personas
6. Interview your current customers or send out surveys
7. Target personas via digital marketing campaigns to see who is converting

It is important to note that you don’t need to know 100% of the answers or conduct all of these activities to start building personas. In fact, you most likely won’t be able to if you are a relatively new company. Your personas will evolve over time, just like your company will.

But is important to start working through these as soon as impossible, gather data, and adapt the personas over time. It’ll help you build a more engaged audience, and a more efficient sales funnel.

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