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When your marketing team is asked about who uses your products, given directives on a deliverable, or developing the next campaign, are they leaning into the end users you’re targeting, ensuring everything supports at least one type of customer? If not, it may be time to revisit, refine, or reintroduce profiles of your prospects to support your marketing and sales efforts.
Representative profiles of your audiences will enable sales and marketing teams to better understand who they are creating for and talking to, equipping them to guide people successfully through the marketing funnel. This is done through creating and laddering efforts up to buyer personas — a detailed profile of your ideal customer types. Below, I’ll explain how.
What Is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a general representation of different customer types. Unlike a user persona — a profile of the person who uses the product — the buyer persona focuses on the purchase decision maker.
Think of this as a biography of audience segments, compiled from actual customer data you have collected, your documented business objectives, generally available market research, and more. Buyer personas often include the following information to help marketing and sales better understand their audiences:
- Demographics: Age, gender, marital status, location, income, education, job details, etc.
- Psychographics: Values, interests, habits, lifestyle, attitudes, motivations, pain points, etc.
- Behaviors: Purchasing history and habits, online behavior, brand interactions, media consumption, reviews and testimonials, etc.
- Goals and challenges: Motivators, aspirations, obstacles, pain points, etc.
Typically, marketers identify three to five customer types, and create write-ups using the information collected. These buyer personas give sales and marketing teams a composite profile of a single type of audience member. This helps them better understand how this user type relates to the full buyer journey, resulting in campaigns, plans, and deliverables that will support these buyer types.
Why Should Advertisers Create a Buyer Persona?
Buyer personas provide clarity and focus on the target audience, empowering your sales and marketing teams to better empathize and connect with your users. They also help you qualify leads that are more likely to convert, for an impactful and effective performance marketing strategy. According to the Marketing Insider Group, using buyer personas resulted in:
- 56% of companies generating higher-quality leads.
- 36% of companies creating shorter sales cycles.
- 24% of companies developing more leads.
Companies that segment their database by buyer persona exceed lead and revenue goals by 93%, Marketing Insider Group reports.
Buyers also respond to a personalized purchase experience: 94% of marketers in HubSpot’s “The State of Marketing” report note that offering this customization impacts company sales. However, only two in three marketers say they have the high-quality data on their target demographic necessary to create these game-changing experiences.
The key is understanding the right mix of buyer personas for your organization.
Types and Examples of Buyer Personas
Generally, aiming for three to five distinct buyer personas allows you to target a variety of audience segments. If you’re new to buyer personas, don’t have a lot of user insights, or are tight on time, even one or two personas helps ensure you’re focusing marketing and sales efforts efficiently.
Consider different user mindsets when developing buyer personas. While there is a set of common user segments that sales and marketing teams rely on, it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach. Typical ways to break down buyers include competitive, spontaneous, methodical, humanistic, or negative. Here’s a breakdown of each type:
Competitive
A competitive buyer values results, data, and proof points they can quickly see. Often direct and to the point, they want the facts. They look for products and solutions they can count on, that are built to last, and give them an advantage. Consider a persona that includes quantifiable metrics and benefits, shows why your offering is superior, anticipates the competitive buyer persona’s questions, and provides product proof points.
Spontaneous
A spontaneous buyer is someone who makes a quicker buying decision, often based on how they feel in the moment or on the immediate return on investment. They look for clear and direct confirmation that this purchase is what they want now. Consider a persona that focuses on motivators, solutions, or differentiators in the market, or an immediate payback. In marketing, this persona often reacts to strong visuals and emotive information, and limited-time or time-sensitive offers.
Methodical
A methodical buyer values thorough research and understanding before committing to a decision, and that includes info about your product or service and that of your competitors. They consider and compare features and technical details, focusing on how the purchase works. Determine the most important information they seek to make an informed, confident decision when creating a methodical buyer persona. Consider case studies, fact sheets, value calculators, or other real-life proof.
Humanistic
A humanistic buyer values taking time to come to a decision, based on emotional factors such as empathy, connection, or values. They want to feel a sense of trust and authenticity with the product or company. Transparency supports their decision-making process. Understand their values, purchase history, or previous actions to determine what information to use to tell your brand story. These personas want to know about your business, and that you can back up your stories with actions.
Negative
A negative buyer persona is the makeup of the audience segment you’re not targeting. They may be very engaged, but don’t lead to a sale. These personas take a lot of company resources on the journey to purchase and ultimately don’t result in a closed sale. They distract sales and marketing teams from more likely prospects, and can be a drain on profits. Glean insights for this persona by looking at trends in information such as potential sales that were closed and lost, highly engaged digital users that don’t convert, abandoned carts, returns, complaints, and more.
How to Create a Buyer Persona
Documenting and sharing buyer personas with the sales and marketing teams will help make sure everyone is aligning work to a set of agreed-upon user types. Remember, these are general makeups of semi-fictional prospects, buyers, and customers, so there will be variances in the real world, but this is a good starting point for understanding your audiences.
Research and Collect Information
Gather information you have on hand — analytics, first-party data, feedback, etc. — as well as current and potential customer interviews, competitor analysis and audits, industry benchmarks, or social listening findings. Analyze the findings and segment information into the persona groups you create to better understand the current state of your customers and potential addressable market.
Visualizing a Buyer Persona
Formalized buyer personas are commonly created as documents that look similar to a resume, often including a name, an image, and a backstory. Key information and topics about the buyer and their buying habits or motives are listed in the persona documentation. It’s also a good idea to add an image to help visualize the buyer persona, along with a background blurb.
Information in a Buyer Persona
Persona names often align or allude to the persona type they represent. Through the information you have collected to create your buyer personas, create a composite of that user segment, which often includes demographics, psychographics, behaviors, and goals, as explained above.
Validating a Buyer Persona
Once you have finalized your buyer personas, share these with the teams who know your user segments the best and will be using these write-ups going forward. Ask for feedback: What parts of the personas do they challenge, or is anything missing that would help them do their job better?
Take the feedback and update the personas as needed. Revisit the profiles over time: Is there new or different information that should be incorporated into the personas? Are there outdated examples, or different users you should consider as your organization or product line changes?
Key Takeaways
Sales and marketing teams can better understand the people that are purchasing their products or services through buyer personas — semi-fictional biographies of customers and prospects based on a user segment. These profiles are created with quantitative and qualitative information based on current customers and prospects, market data, and more, and provide demographic, psychographic, and behavioral information about each audience segment. By using personas, sales and marketing teams can better understand the people they are connecting with, which can lead to a shorter sales cycle and increased revenue.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is a negative buyer persona?
A negative buyer persona is a representation of the type of buyer you aren’t going after. It’s a fictional biography backed up by actual customer and market data of a buyer that isn’t the right fit for your audience, product, or service, so the sales and marketing team understands who they’re not talking to.
What goes into persona development?
Personas are created using a variety of data and quantitative and qualitative inputs, including demographics, psychographics, behaviors, and goals and challenges.
Buyer persona vs. user persona: What’s the difference?
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional biography of the people who purchase a product or service, and is used by sales and marketing teams to influence efforts during the buyer journey. A user persona is a representation of the type of people who use the product or service you provide, which helps to inform product and design teams. While that could be the same person, it likely could be different people, and influence different roles and tasks within marketing and sales functions.
