Firstly, to avoid confusion, this blog is about steps to building a more effective ‘buyer personas’ and not ‘user personas’. User personas are usually aimed at those using an end product. This is beneficial if you are in a Product or UX team and want to understand how your app or software is being used. Whereas buyer personas are those you want to influence to buy your product, as they are the people who will make purchase decisions and hold the budget or purse strings! For Marketing Teams, it’s the buyer personas which should be the focus.

What is a Buyer Persona you ask?

Shopify explains it as: “A buyer persona is a fictionalised characterisation of your ideal customer(s) based on information about them and how they use your product or service. Buyer personas are usually presented as a quick summary of demographic and psychographic information with a fake name and (stock photo) face, making it easier to recall and reference the persona in your decision-making process.”

Personas are crucial to understanding your target market at a deeper level, to focus your content and your message in a way that talks to them, and maximises your chances of conversion. There are several benefits to creating and adopting personas. Starting with bringing focus and purpose to your key messaging and content (demand generation), to attracting this audience enough that they end up on your website, app, event stand and so on (lead generation).

1 – Analyse your purchase data

The data you already hold can be crucial to identify your areas of success. Equally, your points of failure – or as I like to call them, points of reflection – provide an excellent way to see what went wrong. Was the message off, the chosen visuals, or did you target a channel that wasn’t popular for your persona? Even marketing campaigns that flopped provide an excellent opportunity to work out why, and do it differently next time.

Go into your CRM, website and other tools to generate reports for items like:

  • Top ten products or services sold this year – if you are selling multiple products or services, or perhaps variations or packages of your products, this will aid you in making those connections to see if a specific item is seeing success (and may also help you to verify your buyer persona too).
  • Top 3 months with the highest volume of sales – this will help to identify seasonal trends that could exist for what you are selling, to choose marketing campaigns on specific times of year.
  • Pages with the highest exit rate – Clearly people are making it to these pages, so something has got them there – perhaps it was a compelling social media campaign. So what is it on these pages which isn’t resonating with your personas and causing them to leave without taking action?

Of course the list is not exclusive, and varies depending on your industry and business type, so tailor this according to your individual needs. Doing this type of data browsing and analysis may show that just before the end of a financial year, or right before a seasonal holiday, your target persona is most likely to make the purchase or be visiting your site. This is your opportunity to capture their attention, complete that form fill, or find out more about your services. Maximise the points where your target audience is engaging or viewing your content. Every interaction is a possibility to earn more trust, and convert into a lead.

2 – Document your persona(s)

It’s all very well loosely having in your mind that your core personas are a 40-something male searching for project management software. But this is vague and not enough information to begin writing a compelling message. This may sound glaringly obvious, but if a persona just stays in people’s minds, then it can warp and change over time and dilute your message and activities.

By documenting your buyer personas (I would recommend no more than 3 if it’s possible, to avoid splitting messages too much), it allows everyone in the relevant teams to revisit them and ensure all activities are aligned to them. It also allows you to iterate the persona over time, and although you won’t be editing this document every week or month, you can expect buying habits and pain points to evolve. Especially when so many products and services are impacted by technological advancements for example. Again, it depends exactly on your sector, and who your target audience is, but revisiting your persona documentation 1-2 times a year is a sensible frequency to consider changes or adaptations.

If you are stuck on what template to use for your persona, there are many resources out there, including this helpful guide from Hubspot. Or, if you are a user of GenAI (who isn’t these days), you can get AI to support you with a recommended layout for considering all of the options a buyer persona needs.

3 – Outline (or revisit) your positioning and messaging

Once you feel you have a good grounding on the type of person spending their money with you, plus what, when, and why they are buying, you can make a start on your positioning and messaging. If you have already defined this, now is the time to see if it aligns to your identified personas.

Positioning and messaging can be multiple blogs by themselves as both are big topics with many considerations! We will go into this in greater depth in another article soon. For now, focus on this list below as an outline to help you incorporate some crucial aspects to consider for positioning your product or service to your persona, and key messaging to include such as pain points and value props for the sales teams to reference:

  • Product description – what is it that you have to offer?
  • Product features – what are the best parts of your product? What stands out?
  • Competition overview – what are the competition doing?
  • Value proposition – a summary of core benefits and how your product is better/ different
  • Differentiator(s) – how are you different from other similar offerings?
  • Challenge(s)/ Pain point(s) – what key challenges do you solve?
  • Benefit(s)/Value – summarise the value your product or service brings

4 – Test your message! No, really, you should

Never just assume you got it spot on. Echo chambers of information can be a dangerous thing. Even the most experienced Executive with 30-years in ecommerce, should still test the message for its retail customers. If you already hold some strong customer relationships, now is the time to capitalise on that. Contact some companies or individuals that you know will be truthful, and get some real feedback – ideally on a virtual call or in-person if feasible. This way you can gauge some live reaction and emotion to the messages you’re testing. Emotive data can be hard to come by.

If you are a smaller business with limited customers right now, using a survey, with perhaps an incentive to take part (£50 retail voucher?) is an option to go broader with your responses. This can be beneficial regardless of your business size to get more quantitative data. The other benefits of this is a baseline to improve and tweak your message, so that if you do a survey the following year let’s say, you can measure if the response changed, improved and so on. Be sure to use the same structure to have a useful comparison the next time.

If you are looking for tooling to support this, there is specific software as well as polls and heat maps that you could consider – depending on your budget of course. Take a look at this blog from Userpilot for specific ideas to explore.

5 – Share your personas with the rest of the company

The final step can get overlooked. Share your persona document, plus your positioning and message, with the rest of the company! This work goes beyond just the Marketing Team. Customer Success, Sales, Product, Procurement, and more, can all benefit from having access to this to aid their current and future conversations. It also supports inter-departmental relationships by being open with information and communication with other teams.

The other benefit this can bring, is if your salespeople are speaking to prospects and hear a new pain point that isn’t currently documented and considered, this can aid the evolution and updating of your persona and supporting materials. These colleagues are ‘front line’ staff hearing true use cases throughout the year. Taking note of this feedback will mean your persona, positioning, and message, remains current and relevant to ensure those sales keep rolling in.

Conclusion

Let’s recap. You have carried out research based on historical data you have available. This has helped you to identify some problems your product solves, as well as trends on why and when people are buying. You have now documented your persona(s) to have a structure available to all who need it. You have created an outline of your positioning and messaging and feel confident about what sets you apart from similar organisations. In addition, you have tested whether your message actually resonates by speaking with real people who have bought your product or service.

This is a big achievement – and even if you don’t have it perfectly yet, you can iterate and improve as you learn more from marketing campaigns and purchase information. Never view this as a one and done exercise. Marketing strategy must evolve to stand the test of time, but for now, rejoice in your efforts and get started on your next marketing campaign with a new found focus and excitement.

 

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