How to Create the Perfect Buyer Persona in 7 Steps using the Hubspot Tool
Step 5. Describing the characteristics of their jobs
A good buyer persona will allow your company to personalize your marketing and even make it scalable. The core of making a buyer persona is making your target audience feel human to you so you can connect to their deepest wishes and unique needs.
Personalized marketing is something your customer expects now these days, gone are the days that you can just let the world know you exist and wait for orders to roll in.
This April 2018 survey shows that almost half of consumers expect their advertisements to be personal, these days all consumers expect a company to reach out to them in a personal way. But, almost 50% of marketers struggle with personalizing advertisement and other outbound marketing. Inbound marketing benefits even more from a well-developed buyer persona.
But keep in mind that there should be a good balance between inbound and marketing to give your prospect a positive buyer-experience. More about that in this article:
Continue reading to find out more about crafting and understanding how a buyer persona benefits you and your prospects.
What is a buyer persona?
You can think of a buyer persona as being a ‘semi-fictional representation based on research and real-life customer-data’, you combine data from existing customers and prospects into one profile.
What should a buyer persona include?
You can decide to not include too many many things like in the example buyer persona below, or you can choose to include as many details as you possibly can. It all depends on how specific you want to be when targeting your audience with inbound and outbound marketing. Below the screenshot, you will find an overview of all the things you can include in the buyer persona/ buyer profile.
Demographics
- Age
- Gender
- Income
- Location
- Home situation (family)
- Annual income (approximate)
- Education (MBA, high school, etc?)
Professional details
- Work/Industry
- Job title
- The size of the Company
- What are his/her goals in terms of work?
Psychographics
- Personality
- Values
- Interests
- Subconscious and conscious beliefs
- Motivations
- Priorities
Goals
- What are his/her believes?
- What are the characteristics of his/her personality?
Challenges
- What are his/her biggest fears?
- What are his/her pain points?
- What challenges is he/she facing?
Influence
- Favorite blogs/websites
- Favorite magazines/books
- Favorite thought leaders
Buying process
- What is his/her role in the purchase process?
- How does he/she regularly buy?
- What are his/her objections to purchasing?
Most companies will create a story using all the specific details to make their perfect buyer feel more real, almost like a real person who you see in Starbucks every week when you go for your Saturday coffee.
TIP: You can make the buyer persona profile even more tangible by including a picture, to bring this fictional persona to life.
Who at your company will benefit from a buyer persona?
At this point, you might not know how big the impact on your company will be when you create one or more buyer personas. To make this clear, I will list every person in your company (or which part of the company) that is impacted by this semi-fictional buyer persona.
- Each team that deals with clients. They will be able to provide better value in marketing, overall services, and (after) sales.
- The marketing team(s) can use each buyer persona as a guideline to come up with individual advertisements to deliver great quality outbound marketing-material.
- The sales team(s) can better qualify leads since they are able to better see the different needs between each target-audience.
- The leadership of you as the business owner will improve now that every employee knows what to aim for. The overall goal is much clearer when everyone knows what the goal is.
I am a freelancer since 2016, and I have made good progress so far. I have had many nice projects, some long-term clients who love working together, and 2020 will be the year that I’ll make big steps with my business. I’m gonna take it to new levels so to speak, and understanding my existing customers and prospects is an important part of this process.
That is why I decided to make three buyer-personas since I tend to have three types of customers: The B2B marketers, the small to medium-sized companies that need inbound-marketing material such as blogs and/or guest posts, and the companies that need their marketing-material localized from English into Dutch or vice versa.
I have decided to write an article about this process because I’ve noticed that many people have problems creating these buyer profiles/personas, and I want to help you improve your business. So read on, below you’ll find the 7 steps you need to take to make the perfect buyer persona(s) for your specific situation.
How many buyer personas should you create?
To be totally honest with you, there is no specific amount that works for you and me. Each company is different, each specific market is different due to a difference in culture, economics, etcetera.
But I can recommend that you make at least three different ones for your business, to make sure you can deliver your product or service to each targeted market. Take my business as an example where I provide services as my product (translating and writing).
I do write for different markets, different types of clients, each specific type of client need a (partly) different approach. And that is why I made three different buyer persona to approach each type of potential client in the best way possible.
And for your specific situation, follow this rule: The more specific types of clients you have, the more unique buyer persona you should have to approach each customer and prospect in the best way possible.
An example: If you have clients on the saas-market and the insurance-market, you should make one unique buyer persona based on your clients on the saas-market and another buyer persona for your clients that are one the insurance-market.
What are the 7 steps to make a buyer persona using the Hubspot tool?
Let’s get started with creating the three buyer persona for my specific needs, keep in mind that these three examples might not work for you. You can copy them if you like, but don’t be afraid to make some of your own. Follow this link, and click on the button ‘Build my persona’, then you’ll find the first step.
Step 1. Creating a name for your buyer persona
Part of what makes us human is having a name, right? The same goes for virtual personas like the ones we are creating here, so let’s give them a nice name that makes it easier for us to identify them as personas. Do you see how I named him Marketing Mark? This is to let myself (and perhaps other team members) know which prospects are similar to Mark, and which goal they have in mind for their future. In this case, it would be to expand their marketing by me creating inbound marketing-material for them.
Step 2. Defining the demographic traits of your buyer persona
Your goal is this step is to define as many details about your buyer persona as possible (if useful), details such as education, age, and home situation. These included details will help you to create a more realistic image of your buyer persona, as a result, your messages will resonate better with them and attract them to you. I choose to target people between 25 and 34 years old since I’m 34 years old myself so I can relate with this target audience. The same is true for education, always try to relate to your prospects.
Step 3. Defining in which type of industry your buyer persona works
You can qualify leads even better by using details about the company in which your buyer persona (aka buyer profile) works. Things like the industry and the size of the company are important to understand what type of jobs this person has to on a daily basis. A small-business owner has to juggle different jobs every day in order to grow his or her business, knowing which jobs they do every day helps you relate to the prospect and vice versa.
Step 4. The career and seniority level of your buyer persona
In this step, we focus on where in his/her career your buyer persona is at the moment. We find out how their success is measured and some of the things they might worry about. You can include these details to create solutions that are aimed specifically to them, and towards the people, they report to.
Step 5. Describing the characteristics of their jobs
You have to understand some of the day-to-day responsibilities of your buyer persona to provide solutions for these struggles. You might be able to simplify their workflow by providing magnetic inbound marketing content for example. The level of sympathy you can offer will also be greater when you know the things they have to overcome each day to do their jobs correctly. The best way to get people take action is to show them sympathy and an understanding of the position in which they are right now.
Step 6. Describe how your buyer persona works
Try to find things you have in common with your buyer profile, in this case it would be the software: email, project management, CMS en CRM systems, cloud-based software, and word processing programs. By finding these commonalities you are able to better understand and adapt to their workflow and improve the workflow you’ll have, working with them.
Step 7. Finding out where and how your buyer persona consumes new information
Now it’s time to find out where your buyer persona gets his or her information regarding their job. Social media can play a big role in this, or perhaps a more professional setting such as LinkedIn. Pinterest plays an ever-increasing role in sharing information this year. Try to find out where your buyer persona gets new information, you can even post content on those websites, forums or social media pages to attract your buyer persona. The more they see your content, the more they will be attracted to you, as long as you share useful information that is related to them.
And then, it’s time to download or share your unique buyer persona, you can change the color scheme to make the difference easier to see at a glance (By clicking the button in the top left corner). I prefer to download them to my computer and have them ready for whenever I want to use the information stored. You can have them send to you by email if you like, or you can share them with someone who might benefit from them as well, your marketing-team for example.
Bonus: What are the Five Common Mistakes when Creating a Buyer Persona?
1. Profiling the Ideal Fictional Buyers, Not the Real Buyers
Some companies make this mistake when they create their buyer persona. Instead of defining what their real customer looks like, they make up people they want to be customers. Buyer personas are designed to make you understand why existing customers buy from you and understand the things that drive them towards you. A good buyer persona helps you understand real-life customers by focussing your marketing around their needs.
2. Fixating on Demographic Information
Defining where your buyer persona lives is a great tool to identify leads that are similar to already existing customers. But, it is easy to speculate instead of identifying id you include too many details in your buyer persona(s) which have nothing to do with their demographics.
Instead of just focussing on the bigger and more obvious details of your buyer profile, try to also focus on the smaller details. Ask yourself these questions about existing customers; ‘What are their biggest professional hurdles?’ and ‘What drove them to my website?’.
“Good content is not about whether the message is B2B or B2C, it’s about being H2H. That’s human-to-human.” Todd Cameron.
3. Relying too Much on Anecdotes
When a business is doing good, they have a lot of anecdotes/testimonials that they can use in their marketing. This is a good thing, but many companies/businesses rely too much on those anecdotes which will distort the accuracy of the buyer persona and even the buyer-experience.
When anecdotes/testimonials create an all-too-convincing picture it gets too easy to fill in the gaps with ‘colorful assumptions’ which might look sensible, but more often then not, these assumptions are far from accurate. Try to always back every anecdote up with real-life data to stop assumptions being made.
4. Your Stock Photos can help you, but only if they are the correct ones
A stock photo will help to create a more detailed image of the buyer persona, but it’ll never be a perfect image of the preferred buyer persona. I believe it’s not a good idea to let a stock photo be the leading thing in your marketing, it will only lead you further away from your perfect buyer.
So before you include a stock photo, it’s a good idea to make your buyer persona as detailed as possible and by making sure that everybody involved in the marketing has quick and easy access to the written part of the buyer persona.
5. Creating Too Many Personas
Yes, It’s easy to create a dozen of buyer personas for marketing purposes, but this might not be the wisest thing to do. You are trying to ‘hone in’ on each pain, struggle, and needs. But there is a big problem while doing so, the more detailed your buyer persona is, the more buyer personas you end up with.
Try to capture the primary motivations and needs from each buyer persona, but don’t try to go into each minutiae little details of each possible decision.
Try to make a balance between being able to focus on each important decision of your buyer personas, and being able to cater to their needs without losing quality on doing so.
What challenges do you have in creating your buyer personas? Or perhaps you have any tips to share with us. Please let us know in the comments.
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