Buyer personas provide structure and insight for your company

 A detailed buyer persona will help businesses determine where to focus its time, develop optimized marketing strategies, and, most importantly, creates an organized alignment across the organization. As a result, companies will be able to attract the most valuable visitors, leads, and customers to their business. 

In this post, we’ll dive into what some companies look at to develop a buyer persona, how to implement this information into your business objectives, and an example of a well-developed buying persona.

Getting Started By Segmenting Your Customers 

Creating a buying persona is easy as it is pretty much the act of creating your target market based on demographics, psychographics, situational aspects, and economic attributes.

Demographics

Demographics refer to fixed attributes of a companies target market. Some examples are the following:

• Age
• Gender
• Income
• Occupation
• Family Size
• Religion
• Education

Psychographics

Psychographics are the individual characteristics of human behavior. Unlike demographics, which are fixed attributes, psychographics is not.

Some examples are the following:

• Interests
• Hobbies
• Lifestyle
• Personality
• Values
• Opinions

Situational Aspects

Situational aspects describe a situation that drives people to take action (a particular need for a product or service)due to the new conditions, and this sounds a little confusing at first. Still, an example would be a family leaving town and the need for a place for their pet dog.

Where To Collect Your Buyer Persona Data

Examples:

• Google Analytics
• CRM and Marketing Automation
• Facebook Audience Insights
• Google’s Consumer Barometer
• LinkedIn Website Demographics
• Customer interviews or Surveys
• Sale’s Team Feedback

1. Google Analytics: to get data on your users’ behavior, demographics, and pretty much any single action they realize while on your website. Don’t forget to set the essential goals that will match your KPI’s too.
2. CRM and marketing automation platforms: Several automation platforms like Hubspot, Act-on, Mailchimp, and some CRM automation tools like Close.io, Hubspot CRM, and Pipedrive enable you to track your users’ behavior in every single action they complete. So now, you can do any segmentation for anyone that pretty much interacts with your site and better design your customer journey.
3. Facebook audience insights: Use this tool to find many different data categories from people that are part of the Facebook community, your page’s followers, and from custom audiences. Data categories may include age and gender, education, relationship status, household size, lifestyle, buying behavior, and methods.
4. Google Consumer Barometer: In case you want to level up your research and find consumer data related to Internet usage. By using the Google Barometer, you can track your users’ behavior across different screens — for major geographic regions, consumer segments, and product segments. 

How Can Buying Personas Be Used in Marketing?

Companies can implement their buying personas to create an optimized marketing strategy.

The buying persona is the key to a company’s overall success. Some examples that require a buying persona include email marketing campaigns, paid search ads, social media ads, social media content, etc.

For example, instead of sending the same email to everyone in a companies database, they can segment by buyer persona and tailor the messaging according to what they know about those different personas.

Furthermore, when combined with the lifecycle stage, buyer personas can also allow companies to map out and create highly targeted content, which can help businesses achieve a lower cost-per-lead and cost-per-customer — and see higher sales productivity.

A Buyer Persona Example

There are plenty of buyer persona templates to get you started; below is an example of what a buyer persona structure. Note: We also linked a few buyer persona templates we like to use for Algorithmic Global.

Part 1

Name your persona

Age: choose an arbitrary age based on the group they fall in.

Gender: 

Location: is there a specific place those guys are more likely to live in?

Relationships: lives alone or with a spouse? How big is their household?

Work: where do they work? What’s their workday like? If you’re in B2B, you can extend here almost indefinitely.

Personality: emotional or logical? Ambitious or laid back? Give an impression of what they’re like.

Interests: What are their favorite hobbies, books, series? What do they do on weekends?

Influences:

• What media do they go to?
• What channels do they use?
• What celebrities do they follow?
• What brands do they look up to?
• What online channels/social media do they use?
• How do they get information?
• What devices do they use?

“Write down a quote that illustrates the thinking of your user and their decision-making style.”

Part 2

When… [Situation]

I want to… [Motivation]

So I can… [Expected Outcome]

Benefits:

• What are the key benefits that will make the user choose your solution over competitors? 

Anxieties:

• What are the fears the user has that prevent him from switching to your solution?

Hiring criteria: 

• What are the criteria the users set out with when looking for a solution?
• What would they say if you ask, “What are you looking to buy?”

Competitors:

Direct competitors: the same job in the same way

Secondary competitors: same job in a different way

Indirect competitors: a different job with a conflicting outcome 

List of Buyer Persona Templates

We highly recommend the Hubspot and Hootsuite template, but there is no right or wrong answer to choosing a buyer persona template as it will all generate similar results. 

1. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1o61IzSMmrSgDnQVH7kCtPu5J9JqVkGEnyzB32jvLkj0/edit#slide=id.g34cf973c7d_0_55
2. https://www.contentharmony.com/blog/bootstrapped-customer-persona-validation/
3. https://offers.hubspot.com/persona-templates
4. https://blog.hootsuite.com/buyer-persona/