A customer persona, also called a buyer persona, is a representation of the customers that buy your products or services. This enables marketers to understand better who their ideal customer is, what leads them to look for a solution like theirs, and how they make decisions. Show There has been much discussion about the benefits of customer personas. When done right, they help marketers truly understand their customers and support targeted personalized campaigns and programs. People Persona vs. Customer PersonaWhen marketing first started creating personas, they built “people” personas. People personas outline a fictional character with a name, age, personal interests, job title, and other personal information, in addition to their needs, buying habits, and decision-making process. While some of the attributes of a people persona are still used in customer personas, adding that level of personal characteristics isn’t necessary for many situations. A customer (buyer) persona is built from performing actual buyer interviews and pulling together the common emotional and practical aspects of the buying decision, including barriers, success factors, and decision criteria. It doesn’t typically detail the personal characteristics of the individual; instead, focusing on attributes related to the person’s job and role in the buying process (e.g., decision-maker, influencer). B2C Persona v. B2B PersonaIs there a difference between creating a B2B customer persona and a B2C persona? The truth is there isn’t much difference in how you build personas, but there is a difference in the attributes you apply to the persona. B2C personas tend to have more personal attributes, including demographics (e.g., age, income, education, occupation), geographics (location), and psychographics (e.g., interests, what makes them buy, frustrations). B2B personas can include demographic information, but the most important attributes are job title and description, goals, challenges, role in the buying process, trusted sources, perceived barriers, and how they move through the buyer’s journey. Another consideration is the type of product purchased. For high consideration purchases, personas should include more information about the buying process and what drives the persona to buy (or keep them from moving forward). For low-consideration purchases, you don’t need to go as detailed. How Many Personas Do You Need?Most companies create more than one persona, defining each persona as a segment of their customers and representing the most common attributes of that segment. Other companies develop personas for each buying role in the company (e.g., decision-maker, influencer). There is no right number of personas you need. However, having too many makes it challenging for marketing teams to effectively work on each persona-based strategy. The most important way to understand who your customers are and how many personas you need is to interview existing customers. You can also gather customer data from systems that store customer data, such as your CRM, marketing automation platform, ERP system, and other systems. If you use a customer data platform, you can easily pull this data together and get a single customer view. In addition, talk with your Marketing, Sales, and Support teams to gain customer insights that help you identify key characteristics of your customers. Once you have all the customer data identified, look for similarities in key attributes, then decide which ones might require a unique persona. Over my career, I have been fortunate to work for several different organizations, all of which have been in completely different stages of their marketing maturity. Regardless of what stage they are in, one of my first priorities is creating in-depth marketing personas. Marketing personas are like the foundation for building your marketing house. Without personas, how do you know which message will appeal to your target market’s needs? Or where to reach your audience to build awareness and drive them to your website? Or what to write about in your content marketing efforts? Or how to talk to your audience on social media? The problem is, most of the literature on marketing personas takes you down the path toward: “John has a wife, 3 kids, and a dog’ … which has never proved all that helpful for me. How does John’s family portrait help me write good copy or content that gets him to buy my product? It doesn’t. That’s why I wanted to write this article to share my experiences and learnings from creating marketing personas at several companies over the years. Let’s dive into the details. What are marketing personas?My favorite definition of a marketing persona comes from Ardath Albee, who I think is probably the definitive source for B2B personas. Her definition is: A marketing persona is a composite sketch of a key segment of your audience - Ardath Albee Let’s break that down a little bit:
It can also be worth looking beyond the traditional ‘buyer’ when creating your personas.Here are a couple of other personas I have developed and used in different ways that you may want to consider:
So now that you understand what the different types of personas are that you can possibly create, it’s time to start creating them. Having done this a few times now, I’ve found that there are typically four steps:
Let’s dive into each in more detail. Stage 1: Quantitative AnalysisIf you have a horizontal product or service that isn’t exclusively used by one market segment (i.e. Buffer is used by people from many different industries, job roles, etc), then this is a critical stage to understand what your key customer segments are. On the other hand, if you have a specialized product like an order management app for surfboard shapers, then you likely already know who your target segments are – surfboard shapers – and this stage may not be as important. Regardless, here are the steps I take to complete a quantitative analysis and find out who our target segments are:
Here’s more on each stage. 1. Collect a list of customers Start by getting together a list of all paying customers, with as much information about each customer as possible. What information you include will depend on various factors, including industries served, your sales process, etc. Here are a few dimensions I’ve found useful in the past: Demographic Information: This includes basic demographic information about the company, including things like:
Revenue Information: This includes information on how much revenue you make from each customer, including things like:
Engagement Information: This includes information on how deeply they are engaged with your product or service and could include things like:
2. Analyze the list at a company level Once you’ve pulled together a list of customers with your chosen attributes, it’s time to start analyzing that list and looking for trends. My favorite tool for this is Tableau, as you can simply drop the Excel sheet of your customers into it and create an amazing array of charts and graphs, all just dragging and dropping. Some analysis I’ve found useful in the past includes:
What you’re trying to do here is find trends that give you some insights into who your best customer segments are. For instance, in a quantitative analysis at a previous company, I broke down our customers by revenue band (i.e. how much they were paying us). In the process, I found that even though 83% of our customers were paying us between $0-$100 per month, that percentage customers only made up 34% of our revenue. On the other hand, the segment that was paying us between $100-$1000 per month only made up 13% of our customer base but accounted for almost half of our revenue. Based on this insight, we started to look more deeply at who these ‘sweet spot’ customers were (i.e. the ones paying us between $100 and $1000 per month) and found that they were largely from a few key industries: Based on this insight, we started to target Construction, Food & Beverage & Manufacturing as our key segments (Professional Services, although large on the graph above, is actually a mix of lawyers, accountants, PR firms, etc, which, when broken into each industry, were not a significant volume). 3. Analyze the list at the individual level Now that you know who your best customer segments are at the company level (i.e. construction companies with 100-1000 employees), it’s time to then find out who the ideal customer segment is at the individual level (i.e. who is it within these companies that you need to be targeting). The process for this is largely the same as above. Gather a list of all the customers in your sweet spot (I.e. construction companies with 100-1000 employees) and then include in that list information on the primary buyer/user of your product. This could include information like:
Once you’ve got this together, load it into your chosen analysis tool and start to build some graphs and charts to see what you can learn. Continuing the example above, we found that within Construction Companies, it was primarily the Project Manager that was using and purchasing the product, so they became our Marketing Persona. Stage 2: Qualitative AnalysisNow that you have a good understanding of who your target segments are, at both the company and individual level, it’s time to start learning more about these people. In my opinion, the most effective way to do this is good old-fashioned customer interviews. Here’s the process I generally go through:
To do this, I generally pull the names and email addresses of everyone I want to reach out to into a spreadsheet and upload it into a CRM / sales automation tool, which can help with sending a series of emails to each of these customers and organizing your efforts based on who replies or who needs further follow-ups. Here’s a template for an email series I’ve sent in the past: Email #1 Hey John How are you? My name is Aaron Beashel, and I am the [Position] at [Company Name] I’m reaching out as I’m interested in learning more about how you use our product, what benefits you get from it, what you were using previously, etc. I want to feed this information to our marketing, product & support teams so we can make [Product Name] better for you. Would you be willing to speak with me for 30 minutes over the phone and tell me a bit more about how you use [Product Name]? If so, you can simply click here to select a time that works best for you, or you can reply to this email, and we’ll work out a time. Look forward to speaking with you, John! Aaron Email 2 – Sent 3 days after the initial email Hey John I just wanted to follow up on my previous email and see if you had 30 minutes to tell me about how you use [Product Name]. As I mentioned, the goal of this is to learn how customers like you are using the product so that we can ultimately make it better for you. If you’re up for a quick chat, you can simply click here to select a time that works best for you, and I’ll give you a call then. Look forward to speaking with you, John! Aaron Email 3 – Sent 6 days after the initial email Hey John I know you’re super busy, so just wanted to send you 1 final email and see if you had 30 minutes to chat with me about your use of [Product Name]. If so, you can simply click here to select a time that works for you, and I’ll give you a call then. If you can’t spare the time, that’s all good too. I really appreciate you using [Product Name] and hope it’s all going well for you. If there is anything we can ever do to help, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our support team at [Support Email]. All the best! Aaron As you can see, these emails contain links to a page where people can book a time that suits them. I typically use Calendly for this. The reason it’s essential to include these links is it prevents you from having to exchange 10 emails back and forth with each customer trying to coordinate times, which is a massive timesaver for everyone. I’ve also found it increases the number of interviews you actually get booked (as it makes it easier for people to book them).
Q1: Can you briefly describe your business? I’m interested in understanding the size, primary expertise, location, etc. I recommend starting every interview with this question. It gets people talking and gives you a bunch of information you can use to segment the answers to later questions (I.e. looking at how large enterprises respond vs small businesses) Q2: What is your role within the organization? What department does that fall in? How many people are on your team? This question gives you a good insight into who is using your product (particularly for horizontal products that could be used by any department, like project management tools, for instance). It can also help to segment responses to later questions (i.e. What are marketing teams using your product for vs finance departments). Q3: What are the main goals and KPIs of your role? By understanding the main goals and KPIs of your target audience, you can create messaging that showcases how your product helps potential customers achieve the things they’re being paid to achieve. Q4: What are the main frustrations and pain points in your role? By understanding the biggest pain points & frustrations, you can create messaging that showcases how your product can solve those pain points and help them achieve the goals and KPIs of their role (as learned in the previous question) Q5: What do you use our product to achieve? At its core, people ‘hire’ your product to achieve something they need to achieve. By understanding what job people need your product do, you can create effective messaging that showcases how your product can help get that job done. Q6: Please briefly describe how you achieved this before you found our product. What were the problems associated with this method? By understanding what people were previously doing to achieve whatever your product helps them achieve (and the pain points of the previous method), you can create effective messaging that convinces them to change their process and use your product. Q7: What is the main benefit you get from using our product? By understanding the main benefits people get, you can start to create a messaging hierarchy that focuses on the main benefits people are getting rather than on some other benefits that you might think are important but actually aren’t. These responses are also interesting when segmented by role, industry, company size, etc, as they allow you to see the value different types of users get from your product (I.e. A CRM makes it easier for Sales Reps to remember to follow up prospects, but a Manager mainly gets value from the reporting & forecasting features). Q8: What triggered you to seek out a solution like ours? Best asked to newer customers, this question helps you understand what internal business events trigger people to seek a solution like yours and can help you devise sales & marketing strategies to find these people when they’re in an active buying state or even cause the buying trigger to occur. Q9: What are the top 3 things you’re looking for in a product like ours? Understanding people’s priorities when searching for and assessing a tool like yours can help you create effective messaging & content that shows how your product is the best fit for their needs. Q10: What does your buying cycle look like for a product like ours? And who’s involved? This question can give you a good insight into the buying committee (or lack thereof) that would be involved in purchasing your product and can inform everything from your website content to the sales process you build. For instance, if you know someone from the IT person who often gets involved in the sale and cares about things like security and data governance, you can prepare content that addresses their concerns and speeds up the buying cycle). Q11: What was your biggest fear or concern about using our product? Was there anything that almost stopped you from signing up? Understanding the various things that are stopping potential customers from signing up for your product allows you to focus time and effort on removing those blockers and increasing conversion rates. A good example is LogMeIn, which surveyed people who downloaded their app but didn’t go on to use it. They found that people weren’t sure the product would stay around, as they weren’t sure how the company was making money. By making the pricing more prominent in the app and on the website, they increased conversions by 300%. Q12: What magazines, news sites, trade shows, blogs, etc are you reading to get professional information? If you have a good understanding of where these people are getting their information from, then you can plan top-of-funnel activities to reach them. For instance, if you know they all attend a particular event then you can plan to go to it, or if they’re actively involved in LinkedIn communities then you can try to promote your content there.
Here’s a copy of the spreadsheet I use to summarize people’s responses. You’ll see the columns for summarizing answers line up with my question template above, but feel free to copy it and add or remove anything to make it your own! Stage 3: Drafting PersonasNow that you have a good understanding of who your target segments are and have conducted a bunch of interviews with them, you should have all the information you need to start drafting your Personas. Again, over the years of doing this, I’ve developed a bit of a template for how I like to present the information, and you can see it in action below: The above Persona is for a version control and collaboration tool named Simul Docs, whose primary target market is lawyers. As you can see, it includes key information such as:
Again, all of the sections in this Persona are directly aligned to the questions I ask during the interview, so feel free to add or remove whatever sections are most relevant to you. Now that you’ve built your Buyer Persona, it’s time to get the information into the hands of the people who will use them. How you go about this will likely depend on the structure of your organization, who will be using them, etc, but here are a few ideas from ways I’ve done this in the past:
We then put each of these characters on posters in the various offices and meeting rooms worldwide to keep the customer and their needs front and center as employees make decisions.
ConclusionMarketing Personas are the foundation on which you can build your marketing function. Without them, it’s almost impossible to know how to message your product to talk to customers’ pain points and needs or how to reach them to build awareness and drive them to your website. Given how much they inform almost everything else in your marketing function, it’s important to get them right. So take the time to do the quantitative and qualitative research and build personas based on real customer insight, as it will pay off in the long run. Did you find this article helpful? You might also like our all-you-need social media toolkit.Get started for free now |