How to Create Buyer Personas that Drive Inbound Leads

Buyer Personas are the foundation of inbound marketing campaigns. Put simply, a Buyer Persona is a profile of one of your ideal customer types. If you haven’t created them yet, get started with this quick guide.

If you know exactly who you’re targeting, you’ll have a much better idea of what offers and messaging will be effective. You can create a map that links each buyer persona to the Buyer’s Journey and the pieces of content you will use to engage prospects at each stage. This means less wasted time (and budget) and better results sooner.

So, how do you create one?

How to define your buyer persona

• Gather demographic information: income, role, hobbies, gender, where they live, what type of environment that is (e.g. rural, urban) and their educational background.

• What are their pains? What problems do they face at work and what would a successful resolution look like?

If you know this, you can establish a personal connection more quickly through your content and sales calls.

How to get this information

• Interview your existing customers. The good ones. The types you want more of. (For the customers you don’t want, you can create negative personas. This can be a very useful exercise in ensuring your sales and marketing efforts are well focused.)

• Use an online questionnaire to capture information. There are plenty of free providers, just search the web.

• If you’re already doing inbound marketing, why not look through your contacts for trends in how types of leads or customers discover and consume your content.

• Another great trick for those of you doing inbound marketing already is to include buyer persona information on your web forms, e.g. maybe you are looking for customers in a certain industry. Why not ask that question of the people downloading your content?

• One thing a lot of organisations forget is to ask the sales team. Who do they have the best results interacting with? Maybe the final decision maker is at C-level, but the key influencer is lower down the organisation. You should create buyer personas for both, then map your content accordingly.

Get started using our free template by clicking the link below.