Buyer personas are incredibly important for the development of your inbound marketing and quality buyer personas are extremely useful for both your marketing and sales departments. However, getting started can be tough, you’ll likely sit for a moment with a blank stare and wondering just where to begin and how to create a buyer persona.
You don’t need to spend money on time and research initially. You can save yourself both the funds and the time by answering these 20 questions yourself.
How to Create a Buyer Persona: 20 Questions
Personal Background
1. Describe Personal Demographics
Demographic information is a great place to start with information that can be easily obtained. These factors form broad strokes that you can build upon later in the crafting process. Are your customers married? What’s their annual income? Where do they live? Male or female? What’s their age range? Do they have children?
2. Describe Educational Background
What’s their highest completed level of education? What did they study and at what schools? Be specific and create a fictional person who went to the University of Minnesota and not just a “liberal arts school”.
3. Create a Career Path
Where is your ideal buyer today? How did they get there? In university did they major in a subject that’s in the same field they work in today? Have they had a traditional life and career track? Or are they more of the “off the beaten path” type?
it might also help to identify the particular industries served. if the company serves only hospitals and schools, that would be worth noting.
Questions About Their Company
4. In Which Industry or Industries Are They Involved?
We’re not looking for the department or the persona’s role. We want to know what services or products the overall company provides to their own customers. Knowing this can help you later measure the impact your business is making in target markets.
Persona Company is in the printing industry serving school textbook publishers.
5. The Size of the Company.
Know details about the company’s number of employees and annual revenue figures. This can be especially helpful once you begin to create landing page forms to gather lead data.
Questions About Their Role
6. What is Their Job? Their Title?
How long has this person held their role and their respective title? Do they contribute independently or do they manage teams? If they do manage teams, how many individuals and how many teams are they responsible for within their role?
7. Who Reports to Whom?
If you’re focusing on B2C this can be a nuance that adds depth to the buyer personas.
If you’re a B2B focused company, this is of vital consideration when looking at how to create a buyer persona. Is your buyer a manager or at the director level? How well does he or she understand the intricacies of their industry? A more senior individual need less education. Also, how many people are involved to authorize a purchase of your product or services?
8. How is the Persona Measured?
What metrics is your buyer persona responsible for in his or her company? What data do they look at daily? This will help you understand how you can make them successful and what they need to worry about when trying to “hit their numbers.”
9. What Does a Typical Day Look Like?
When do they arrive at work? At what time do they leave? What “busy work” do they have? What do they do when they’re at their most productive state?
This section should not only include their daily work tasks but also what happens during their day outside of work. Is their time mostly spent at the office or at home? Where do they want to be? Where would they rather be? Do they have hobbies? Who do they spend the most time with? Do they watch TV? What shows? Do they drive a car? What clothes do they wear?
This is key when considering how to create a buyer persona. You need to create a real fake person who has a life outside of the office, has aspirations, and has a personality.
10. What Skills Are Required for Their Job?
If they were hiring their own replacement, how would the job description read? What are the ideal skills and does this person have them? Where did they learn the relevant skills? Were the skills acquired through on the job training? Years of experience, or through formal education?
11. Which Tools & What Knowledge is Used?
What tools and software applications are used daily or regularly? Knowing and understanding products they hate and which ones they love can help you identify commonalities in your product and also adjust accordingly if needed.
Questions About Challenges
12. The Biggest Challenges?
You’re in business because you want to help your customers solve a problem that they have. How their problems affect their daily life? Dive into the details and look for the nuances in each situation and be sure to take not of the feelings that are revealed.
For example, you are a CMS provider and your customer is a first time user. What are the pain points for a first time user? The amount of options and sections might be intimidating and they might feel overwhelmed with the number of fields and customer details that can be entered into the system. Those pain points likely differ from an experienced user. The experienced user might want to learn the shortcuts and how this CMS can help them record and access data faster.
Try to invent some “real” quotes that your persona might actually say in a real life situation. “There is just so much information that can be entered into the system,” or “How can I most quickly convert a contact into a qualified lead?”
Questions About Their Goals
13. What Are You Responsible For?
Not the metrics that measure their performance. What are their primary and secondary goals? Knowing this will help you develop ways to help them overcome and achieve their goals.
14. In Your Role, What Defines Success?
You want to make your personas look good. How can you do that? Take the time to learn what can make your customer successful. It’ll greatly enhance communications between your customers and both your marketing and sales teams.
Questions About Learning
15. How Do You Learn New Information?
You absolutely need to learn how your target audience consumes information. This is an essential element when you’re considering how to create a buyer persona.
Do they go online? Do they prefer in-person experiences? Are they reading magazines and newspapers? If online what tools do they use? Are they active on social media or course platforms like Udemy? What sources do they trust the most? Family and friends or industry experts?
16. What Blogs or Publications Do They Read?
When piecing together a typical, try to determine how they stay informed. If you know where they gather information, then you can place yourself in those spots to be seen and establish credibility.
17. Which Associations & Social Networks Are They Involved With?
Investing time and resources in social media marketing is a must, however you need to ask yourself which are deserving of your time and resources. Identify the associations and networks where your buyer persona spends his or her time. This will help you prioritize where you should participate and which conversations you should engage.
Questions About Shopping Preferences
18. Preferred Way of Interacting With Vendors
The process of purchasing your product or service should align with expectations. Your buyer persona should describe what the sales experience should feel like. It should answer how much time is expected to be spent with a salesperson. Do they expect meetings? Do they prefer over the phone? Are they expecting an online only experience?
19. Do They Use the Internet to Search for Products/Services? If Yes, How?
How do they search online? Are they using review sites to learn about products or services before proceeding with their own discussions or do they do a search and then discuss with others? Are they using Google, Bing!, or Duck Duck Go?
20. Describe a Recent Purchase.
Ask about the criteria used to determine the purchase, the evaluation process, or how they compared other products for consideration. If you’re ready for your persona’s objections you’ll be prepared for them in a real life sales situation. Or better yet, you can even include information in your sales materials to educate them about your product or service.
Will your product or service be a first time purchase? Will they be switching to you from someone else? If they are switching, why and what are they expecting from the change?
Last Steps
Now that you have these 20 questions to answer to guide you on how to create a buyer persona, you can find some stock photos to “give a face” to each persona that you create.
You can also begin tailoring communications for each individual buyer persona. You can determine how to best identify the persona by job title, pain points, or information discovery. If you can identify which persona you’re engaging with your teams will be able to more easily engage with actual buyers in a way that’s best suited to push the customer journey forward.
Let’s Talk About Your Brand
shane@3catslabs.com | Call +65-3159-4231
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