- Read time: 7 mins
- Tech level: low
- Key point: improve sales with a buyer persona document.
- Key resource: go straight to the 'persona generator tool'.
A fully realized buyer persona will give you the information you need to draw in your target audience and turn regular website visitors into loyal customers and clients. Creating a buyer persona lets you learn about your audience’s goals and pain points and gives you the tools to create personalized marketing content revolved around them.
You give them the means to find solutions to their problems so that they are the hero in their own journey. In order for your ideal audience to follow this path to success, you need to find out who they are and what that path means for them. If they are successful, you will be too.
To boost conversions and your sales, here are five steps to creating buyer personas.
Step 1. Determine your ideal audience
How to identify your target audience
You need to think about your ideal audience rather than your existing customer/client base because your current audience may not be particularly profitable. Personas are based on your ideal customer, not someone who you just put up with because they’re your current consumer.
When documenting the characteristics of your buyer persona, a common trap is going straight to describing your current audience. This is a natural way to think about your audience, but it’s a habit that needs to be kicked.
Instead of thinking about a typical customer your company deals with on a day-to-day basis, think about your favorite customers. This is a customer who:
- Gets the most use out of your product/service
- Is easy to deal with
- Is low maintenance
- Completes transactions smoothly
- Is a consistent buyer
- You enjoy calling.
These are the customers you should focus your efforts on identifying and documenting when creating your buyer personas. Their relationship with your business is more of a partnership as opposed to that of a master and slave.
You should also talk to the team members who are on the frontline. As they are the ones who deal with all of the customers firsthand, their knowledge is invaluable. They can point out the best kind of customers and the worst kind of customers. Customers who you don’t want to attract are people who:
- Need someone to hold their hand the whole time
- Demand a lot of attention
- Try to argue for a better deal
- Eat up your staff’s time and resources but;
- Do not spend enough money to make it worth it.
These customers may actually be costing you money instead of contributing to the profits of your business because they suck up lots of time and money by using up your resources. You may find that these customers make up a large percentage of your current audience, which is why it’s critical to target your ideal customers rather than your current ones.
Ensure your buyer personas are distinct
Having distinctly different personas gives you more insight into who your audience is and helps you appeal to a wider range of people. This is why you should create the outlines of three different buyer personas, and remember that when creating these outlines, make them markedly different from each other.
Establish primary and secondary personas
Once you have your three different buyer personas, separate them between primary and secondary personas:
- Your primary personas are the ones who help your business grow and your business would not succeed without them
- Secondary personas are also very important but they are not as critical as your primary audience. The reason for having these established persona-tiers is because if there needs to be a decision about which persona to satisfy first, then the decision has already been agreed upon.
Step 2. Get buy-in from the top regarding your ideal buyer persona
Buy-in from senior members of your organization is crucial in solidifying your buyer personas. Their commitment is necessary to create successful strategies so you can target your ideal customers, and without their support, the road ahead will be next to impossible.
Getting buy-in from the top is also critical as it will help in completing step three.
Step 3. Get buy-in from your team and colleagues
The people in charge of producing content are essential in your efforts to appeal to your ideal buyer personas. There are typically three key stakeholders responsible for content production:
- Content owners, who are the organizational unit responsible for maintaining the content and ensuring it’s accurate. They are usually experts on the subject matter.
- Authors, who write the content and send it out for approval.
- Approvers, who review and edit the content, then approve it for publishing.
These are the people who are creating and tailoring the content for your personas, so it’s vital that they understand the characteristics of your ideal buyer personas. You should also make sure that the people in these roles have their voices heard and understood because they should be making content that they believe is useful.
Something else to keep in mind is that you shouldn’t be surprised if not everyone is on the same page at first. Change is difficult for most people and it may take a few meetings to get everyone to agree upon ideal personas, but it is worth it to get everyone on board.
Step 4. Create your primary buyer persona using a persona generator
To save time and effort, use our persona generator tool. Having a solid, usable persona with the click of a button saves you valuable time, which means you can start building the content and strategies that make personas so useful.
You can have a beautifully designed and effective persona in minutes rather than days. The outlines of your primary and secondary personas will come in handy as you begin to create your legitimate persona.
Our persona generator will guide you through each step of the process of creating a new persona and will make sure that you have all the necessary components that make up a strong persona. You may get new insights and more information on your ideal audiences by answering questions you hadn’t previously thought of.
Latest proto-persona templates
See the three latest proto personas created by our persona generator tool.
Step 5. Print your personas and hang them up in common areas of your office
Now that the personas are made, you have to put them to good use.
Print your personas and place them all over your office as a reminder for who you are trying to appeal to. There are several good reasons for this, such as:
- Having your personas there to remind you that they are the most important people in the process can be helpful as it’s easy to get caught up in the busy workings of an organization.
- Printing them out encourages usage of your personas. You’ve gone to all the trouble of making your buyer personas, so it would be a shame to forget about them and not put them to any use.
Having the image of your personas in front of you is also helpful in visualizing your audience as real people rather than simply customers or clients. They are a big part of the process who need to be considered in all of the discussions and decisions that will affect them.
Wrapping up
Visualizing your ideal audience as buyer personas not only helps them have a better customer experience but also helps your business reach its goals. Using our persona generator tool means you have more time to use your buyer personas to help increase your sales because the process is easier and faster than if you were to start from a blank page. Take a project that could have taken weeks into one that only takes a few simple steps by using our generator.
Summary of the 5 main steps
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1
Determine your ideal audience
You need to think about your ideal audience rather than your existing customer/client base because your current audience may not be particularly profitable.
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2
Get support from the top
Buy-in from the top will enable you to successfully implement your new personas.
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3
Get buy-in from your team and colleagues
Your content producers will be creating and tailoring the content for your personas, so it’s vital that they understand the characteristics of your ideal buyer personas.
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4
Create your primary buyer persona using a persona generator
To save time and effort, use our persona generator tool.
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5
Print and display your new personas
The image of your personas in front of you is also helpful in visualizing your audience as real people rather than simply customers or clients.