Chapter 5:

Creating buyer persona is a part of the buzz stand inbound marketing certification course

inbound marketing certification course chapter 4

Do you know how your ideal customer or buyer persona be? In this article, we would discuss about creating this buyer persona so that inbound marketing strategy can be implemented. This topic is an important part of inbound marketing certification course as all targeting would be based on this buyer persona.

In our previous post we had defined the buyer persona. Buyer persona is not as difficult to create as they seem. It is just that you need to apply your mind to create that image for your ideal customer.

Before understanding the methods of creating buyer persona, let’s just have a brief about why buyer persona is important for business.

 

Why Are Buyer Personas So Important for Business?

They help you understand the customer better. This therefore,  makes its way easier to design products, content and services to suit their needs. It helps us know what their specific interests might be, their typical background can be and what offering can bring them to you.

The best personas would involve market research and surveys to gather who can buy your product or service. There can be multiple personas for your offering and there might be different inbound marketing strategy you might want to employ for each of them.

The method of creating Buyer Personas

The best way of deciding buyer persona can be doing market research, conducting surveys and interviews. For carrying out this you can choose a mix group of customers. Some of them might be your prospects, customers and some completely out of the database who might not be aware of your service.

You might want to look at some information mentioned below while choosing your buyer persona

  • You might want to go through your CRM or database to gather information about these customers. You would get information about the kind of content they consume more, their likes and dislikes.
  • Most of the businesses on the internet use forms to get customer information. Form should be designed in such a manner that you are able to gain persona about the person. You should be able to exactly tell from that what the person is looking for.
  • Do take feed backs from people on the ground. You would be able to gain much more information regarding whom you should target.

Finding Interviewees for your Persona Assessment

For establishing which customers would count for you as Targets and which would not out you would need to create a persona. For this persona, you would need to interview people. Now the question arises, which people should we interview? This would be answered below

1) Customers

The perfect place to start this would be reach to your customers someone who has purchased your product or services in the past. The customer might be someone who has had a good experience or bad one. You need both of them. The best part of this would be you would be able to get feedback from them what they like and dislike, what interests them and what not. You can analyze them on various parameters like demographics, behavior, nature of transactions and compare them with your offerings to gain a holistic view.

2) Prospects

Gaining feedback from prospects who have not yet purchased your product is equally important. This helps us know what might he be looking for, which are the customers which are looking for your products and what made them come to you. All these factors would help define our inbound marketing strategy.

3) Referrals

You might be looking to interview some other people who might not have been existent in your database. But, to reach such kind of people can be really hard. The best method in such a situation would be to get in touch with your friends, colleagues, relatives, acquaintances, and some people known to them. This way not only you would be able to find people, you can be sure that you would be getting high quality information.

4) Third-Party Networks

You might use third-party sites for conducting interviews but reliability is not that much as compared to the above 3 options. There are various survey sites from microworkers, clickworkers and craigslist where you can get them done.

After you have decided to interview people you might be wondering what questions to ask them? You can check out Questions for identifying Buyers Persona for this.

Using Research to create Buyer persona

The first stage is collecting data from interviews and surveys. This data is in its raw shape and to be converted into information, some amount of research and analytics is required. We would be discussing the methods how to use this data and convert it into information and using it to create buyer  persona which would be helpful in your inbound marketing strategy.

Using Demographic Information collected from samples

If you are following the steps mentioned in the post. You would be collecting data first. This data would have lots of valuables. You need to pick out the demographics like age, gender, occupation and location and compare it with interests and also your product offering. Those who are interested for product or service or are already making something similar purchase from some other company can be your target.

Using Personas motivation and converting it into information

You would have some specific information like how much time they spend on grooming? Why they use a certain brand compared to others? All this information collected must be noted down to get an image of the buyer which would ultimately help in inbound marketing strategy.

If you now know the kind of people who would be looking after your product then it is time to use this persona for creating inbound marketing strategy.  In the next chapter, we would be discussing about Buyers journey.

You can check out rest of the topics of inbound marketing certification and gain knowledge. In case of any help or information you can contact The Buzz Team.