Table of Contents

What Are Buyer Personas?

Buyer personas are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers. They help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) better, and make it easier for you to tailor content to the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of different groups.

The best buyer personas are developed by conducting market research and gathering insights from your existing customer base. You can do this by conducting surveys and interviews, among other methods. The number of personas you create depends on the nature of your business. You could have as few as one or two personas, or as many as ten to twenty. If you’re new to creating personas, it’s best to start with just a few. You can always create more personas later if needed.

What Are Negative Personas?

While a buyer persona represents an ideal customer, a negative persona represents the type of customer you want to avoid.

Sometimes, you may come across certain individuals or groups who might not be the ideal customers for your product or service. This could include professionals who have already surpassed the level of your product, students who are only interested in your content for academic purposes or research, or potential customers who are too costly to acquire due to low sales price, high likelihood of leaving, or unlikeliness to make any further purchases from your company.

How Can You Use Personas?

Personas are a useful tool for personalizing and targeting your marketing efforts towards different segments of your audience. Instead of sending the same generic emails to all your contacts, you can create buyer personas and tailor your messages according to each persona’s characteristics and preferences. This allows you to provide more relevant and engaging content to your audience, leading to better engagement and increased conversions.

Creating negative personas can bring you the advantage of distinguishing the contacts that are detrimental to your business from the rest, which can lead to a lower cost-per-lead and cost-per-customer, resulting in increased sales productivity.

How Do You Create Buyer Personas?

Buyer personas are created by researching and surveying your target audience, including customers, prospects, and those who align with them.

Here are some practical methods to gather the information that you need to develop personas:

• Conduct interviews with customers in person or over the phone to determine their preferences for your product or service.
• Examine your contact database to identify patterns in how leads or customers discover and consume your content.
• When designing forms for your website, make sure to include fields that collect relevant information about your target audience. For instance, if your audience varies by company size, add a field inquiring about company size. Similarly, you can ask about their preferred social media platforms to gain insights into their social media habits.
• It is important to consider the feedback of your sales team regarding the leads they are engaging with the most. You should analyze the types of sales cycles that your sales team is working with and identify the generalizations they make about the different types of customers that your business serves best. This will help you to understand your customers better and optimize your sales strategy accordingly.