Buyer Personas
What is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona, sometimes referred to as a user persona or a customer persona, is a fictional profile of ideal buyers within your target market. Informed by market research and audience analysis, a buyer persona is an imaginary character who has specific, identifiable character traits and demographics found in your broad target audience. It’s important to remember that a buyer persona isn’t a potential customer that you would one day like to reach, but rather a representation of customers already in your market who you want to sell to.
Want to skip ahead? We’ll cover:
What Do You Need to Include in a Buyer Persona?
Creating detailed buyer personas helps tailor your marketing and sales efforts to better meet the needs and preferences of your target audience. But to really understand your audience, you’ll need to outline some key characteristics of who you’re targeting.
To gather these character traits for your buyer personas, ask yourself:
- Demographics: What is the age group and location of my buyer?
- Professional Status: Which industry do they work in? What is their job title and how senior are they in their department?
- Personality Statement: What values or beliefs do they hold about my product or service, and the market more broadly?
- Pain Points: What are the business challenges they hope to solve? For example, do they want to drive brand awareness, or enter into a new market, or acquire richer data?
- Buying Process: How does this buyer like to be sold to? Are they most responsive on social channels like LinkedIn or do they primarily work on the phone? Are they doing a lot of research before they buy online themselves or do they prefer to ask questions to a sales rep?
With these insights, you can now develop your detailed buyer personas.
How to Create a Buyer Persona
Defining your buyer personas is often the very first step in the sales cycle. It will help inform your outreach strategy and guide you on which channels to use to target prospects. Once you have gathered the relevant information in the section above (demographics, professional status, personality statement and buying process), you’ll need to use your creativity to get into the mind of your buyers.
How you write your buyer personas is entirely up to you and what works for your business. But we’ve included an example below to give you a head start and provide you with an easy structure to follow.
Example buyer persona
Title: Luxury Linda
Demographics: 25-46 yrs old, based in Paris, Milan or New York
Professional Status: Brand Partnerships Lead, Fashion and Homeware industry
Personality statement: “I love what I do, staying ahead of the latest trends is vital to my success at work. The fashion industry can be a competitive space, so I need to consistently prove to my senior leadership team that my department is driving value for our business.”
Pain points: Linda’s current influencer platform has limited capabilities. It has a small pool of influencers with follower bases that don’t match her companies target consumers. She has a large budget, but her executive team doesn’t always understand what her job role entails. She needs better tools to present back her activity to the business.
Buying process: Spends a lot of time on the phone for her work. Emails often get buried in the bottom of a very full inbox.
The Benefit of Buyer Personas in Sales
The real value of buyer personas comes into play when you work across multiple sectors and have a diverse range of customers. Creating unique buyer personas for each segment in your wider market can transform your sales outreach, and ultimately help you convert more qualified leads.
Segmenting your sales communications increases your chances of reaching customers primed to buy what you are selling. Tailored sales outreach is proven to land better with prospects. In fact, emails with personalized subject lines are 22.2% more likely to be opened than those without.
Sounds like a lot of work? With Surfe, it doesn’t have to be. Craft customized outreach communications to increase the chances of converting your leads. Whether it’s through your outreach cadences, a simple cold email, or with a LinkedIn InMail template, Surfe ensures you’re sending the right message to the right buyer persona at the right time.
Common Mistakes to Avoid when Creating Buyer Personas
Making assumptions based on demographic biases
All young people use TikTok to get their news. Everyone in the US likes burgers. Everyone I see on LinkedIn wants to buy my product… If only it were so simple. Basing your personas on well-trodden stereotypes won’t help you find the right buyers for your product or service. Make sure your demographic findings don’t become biases based on how your customer might like to be sold to, or the pain points they’re experiencing.
Ignoring your customers pain points
Pain points are at the core of your buyer personas. If you don’t know what business problems your customers are facing, how can you hope to sell them on the product or service you offer? Use your day-to-day interactions with real customers, and your knowledge of the market landscape to help you uncover prospect pain points.
Not basing your personas on real data and insights
While it’s important to be creative in thinking about how to draft your buyer personas, you should always use real-life data and customer experiences to inform the pain points, buying preferences, and demographics of your personas. Your social channels and website data will be a great source for understanding the channel preferences of your customers, while your discovery and demo calls are valuable opportunities to gather tangible accounts of what your customers want and need.
Forgetting to update your personas
Customers’ needs and pain points will change as your industry does. What might have been true for your customers six months ago, won’t necessarily resonate with them today. Has there been a change in legislation? Is a new competitor on the market? Have sector best practices changed? Whatever the shift, you should treat your buyer personas as something to revisit regularly, so you know how to optimize your sales outreach strategy. Forgetting to update your personas is like forgetting to update your CRM. If a CRM contact has changed position or moved to a new company, you can use an email finder to source their validated, professional email address. You should treat your personas the same way. If you don’t update them, you’ll fail to get through to them.
Case Study: How Twilio’s Refined Buyer Personas Drove Sales Success
Twilio, a leader in cloud communications, are a great example of how refining buyer personas can lead to remarkable business results. Initially, Twilio’s marketing efforts targeted developers, who were traditionally seen as the primary users of their communication APIs. But through analysis and data-driven research, Twilio discovered a crucial insight: product managers and team leaders were actually the primary decision-makers for their new product suite.
Identifying the key decision-makers
As with all good persona development strategies, Twilio’s journey began with a deep dive into their customer data and market research. Conducting interviews and surveys, and analyzing user behavior, Twilio realized that while developers were the end-users, the purchasing decisions were made higher up the chain. Product managers and team leaders had the authority and budget to invest in new solutions. So, Twilio’s sales team shifted their focus from targeting developers to key decision-makers, who were more concerned with strategic outcomes and ROI than simply technical capabilities.
Tailoring content and outreach
Empowered by this new understanding, Twilio redefined their buyer personas to include detailed profiles of product managers and team leaders. Twilio’s marketing team then crafted tailored content that addressed these personas’ specific needs and concerns. For instance, instead of focusing on the technical features of their APIs, the content highlighted how Twilio’s solutions could streamline project management, enhance team collaboration, and drive business growth.
Driving dramatic growth
For Twilio, the results spoke for themselves.
- Reduced content production time: By aligning their content strategy with the precise needs of their new personas, Twilio cut content production time by 40%. This efficiency gain allowed their marketing team to focus on creating high-quality, targeted content rather than broad, generic messages.
- Rapid persona launches: With a clear understanding of their target audience, Twilio was able to quickly develop and launch new personas. This agility was crucial in keeping up with market changes and staying relevant to their audience. In fact, they managed to roll out new personas in under 90 days.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about Buyer Personas
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a fictional character profile of ideal buyers in your target market.
What should buyer personas include?
To fully capture the needs of your target buyers, your buyer personas should include their demographics, professional status, a personality statement, their pain points and their preferred buying method.
Why are buyer personas useful in sales?
Buyer personas can help you personalize your sales outreach to address your customers’ specific pain points. Tailored outreach can help you convert more qualified leads and help you avoid spending time on unviable leads.
Should I use buyer personas to tailor my sales outreach?
Absolutely! Personalized sales outreach is proven to convert more leads and generate more revenue. Segment your outreach according to your buyer personas to see how you can make more sales.
What tools and technologies can I use to tailor my sales outreach?
Chrome plugins like Surfe can help you write personalized sales outreach communications for each of your buyer persona segments. Surfe integrates with LinkedIn so you can even tailor your InMails, too!