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A simple guide on how to define your buyer personas for success in the digital age

As mentioned in the introduction article, defining the different buying personas for your business is not an easy task. In the digital age, however, it is vitally important for the success of your business.

The aim is to create archetypes or models of the people who represent your actual target buyers. Once you have defined the different personas it is useful to give them names (for internal use only!). You can even find photographs or illustrations from picture libraries that best represent these personas so that everybody in your organisation can picture the different buyers and understands what these buyers are looking for from you.

Initial brain storm

The work of defining the different buyer personas for your business is best done by a team of people the majority of whom should have customer facing roles. These are the people who will be able to give you the best insight into the buyer types.
The task of developing these buying personas is best broken down into two distinct phases. Initially, a good brainstorming sessions is required to list all the different types of buyer you can think of for your products and services.

Detailed analysis

Once you have created a list of all the buyer personas for your business the next stage is to build up a detailed profile for each one. We recommend breaking the task down into manageable chunks:

  1. Demographics: As well as the basic age, gender, education, qualifications, you need to detail their job titles, responsibilities, level of seniority etc.
  2. Psychographics: Here you’ll cover career aspirations, attitudes, beliefs, values, interests and lifestyles.
  3. Business Drivers: What industry are they in, what products/services interest them, why do they need your products/services, what are their key purchasing drivers, why don’t or won’t they do business with you?
  4. Buying Process/Cycle: It’s important to understand both the buying processes within their organisation and the buying cycles – when will they buy? Knowing when they are in the research, evaluation, decision-making, due diligence or purchase phase will give you a big advantage creating your content.
  5. Challenges: Understanding the problems they face and the challenges they have to deal with is key information which will enable you to create valuable content specifically for them. Conversely, it’s important to know what they don’t care about and why.
  6. Information Sources: You can learn a lot about them by reading the trade journals they read, browsing the web and social media sites they use or visiting the exhibitions or seminars they attend.

Applying this information

When you have gathered all this data for each buyer persona everyone in your business will have a much clearer image of each and every persona. As a consequence, you will be in a position to create the content that each individual persona is interested in.
If you would like help clarifying and defining the buyer personas for your business, give Alan Myers a call on 0116 278 7788, we’d love to help.