Meet Your Ideal Customers: The Ultimate Guide to Creating Buyer Personas

Forming a connection with your audience is essential to retain customers and inspire new buyers to choose your business for their needs. When you’re disconnected from your audience, you waste time, resources, and money on products and services they aren’t interested in. 

Avoid disconnection by developing your buyer personas.

What is a buyer persona? A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer based on your current audience. These are the types of people who would ideally use your products or services.

When you’re developing new products, services, or marketing content, it’s important to know your target audience. Your personas are a resource to ensure alignment between your brand, your offerings, and your audiences.

Creating a product or service that is going to appeal to everyone is nearly impossible. It’s also impractical to assume everyone will respond the same way to your marketing tactics.

Imagine you’re having a conversation with your best friend. You’re telling them a crazy story about what happened to you over the weekend. Now imagine that your best friend is replaced by your grandma. You likely are not going to tell that story in the same way you told your best friend. Instead, you’re going to reframe it to best suit your audience.

When you’re working on a new initiative, you might not be interacting with your customers face-to-face. Buyer personas give you the opportunity to do so.

Personas have real results. In fact, 56% of companies generated higher quality leads using buyer personas. 

Creating buyer personas can’t hurt your business efforts. They can only help. So why not get started?

Every business is different, so we created two guides based on business type. To start working on your buyer personas, select the description that fits your business best.

You run a B2C business with limited marketing knowledge and are ready to take initial steps to define buyer personas. However, you rely heavily on assumptions instead of thorough research. As a result, you struggle to create accurate, nuanced personas that help guide strategic decisions.

Leveraging both quantitative data and qualitative insights, create robust, humanized profiles of your most valuable customer segments and those you haven’t reached to inform marketing decisions.

• I run a B2C business, selling consumer products or services directly to customers.
• I have a basic grasp of marketing concepts like segmentation and targeting.
• I recognize the need to understand different customer types/personas.
• I focus heavily on my own assumptions about customer needs and interests.
• I would like to better understand my audience and reach new ones.

If you made initial attempts at defining buyer personas based on job roles, but without much research, your personas may be too generic and focused on your own offerings rather than customer needs. 

• ​​I operate a B2B company selling to other businesses.
• I have a basic to moderate grasp of B2B marketing fundamentals.
• I see the value of understanding different buyer roles/personas.
• I took initial steps to profile personas but have some gaps.
• I identified personas based on job titles or departments only, lacking insights into motivations.
• I may have underestimated the number of personas, missing key decision influencers/buyers.
• I currently focus more on business’ offerings than customer needs and goals.

Find the guide you identify with most, put on your thinking cap, and use our buyer persona template to create your buyer personas. Remember: there are no bad ideas.

Once you finish creating your buyer personas, it’s time to move on to the next step. Discover our guide to determine how to actually put your personas to good use.

Turn your buyer personas into customers. Contact us to create a marketing strategy specific to your business needs.