Buyer

Persona
Guide
+ Templates
Table of Contents

What are Buyer Personas?................................................................................................................03

How to use Personas in Marketing,

Sales, and Customer Service............................................................................................................04

How to Make Buyer Personas...........................................................................................................09

Conclusion............................................................................................................................................15
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 strongest buyer personas are based on

market research as well as on insights you gather
from your actual customer base (through surveys,
interviews, customer data, etc.). Depending on
your business, you could have a few personas or
a lot of specialized personas — you can always
develop more later if needed.

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How to Use Personas The first step is to craft your persona by asking specific questions
about your ideal customer to find out as much as you can about
in Marketing, Sales, who they are and how they interact with your organization,

and Customer Service in order to pinpoint how to make them a customer.

At the most basic level, personas allow you to Questions such as:
personalize or target your marketing for different What is their profession?
segments of your audience. For example, instead of
sending the same lead nurturing emails to everyone What does a typical day in their life look like?
in your database, you can segment by buyer persona
Where do they go for information?
and tailor your messaging according to what you
know about those different personas. When utilized
How do they prefer to obtain goods and services?
correctly, buyer personas can allow you to produce
highly targeted content that leads to a higher influx What is important to them when choosing a vendor?
of new and repeat customers who are pre-qualified
by data. What do they value most?

Research from Single Grain showed that What are their goals?
companies who used buyer personas saw:
• Websites were 2-5x more effective.

• Personalized emails had a 14% higher Creating a buyer persona offers you insights
click-through rate (CTR). into the customer that you otherwise
• Conversion rates were 10% higher. wouldn’t be privy to. Once you have your
persona, share it with the marketing, sales,
and customer service team to ensure that
your entire organization has the same view
of your ideal customer.

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 Buyer Personas for Marketing
Also known as “marketing personas,” it comes as no surprise that the focus of buyer personas is
often your marketing team due in large part to the wide range of insights you can achieve when
correctly using a persona for marketing.

Uses for buyer personas

for your marketing team include:

• Building effective content marketing strategies

by focusing keyword research efforts.

• Identify and prioritize the most relevant

promotional activities.

• Segment your email list by sending targeted

offers to buyers based on their preferences. Source: SmartBug Media

• Time your marketing campaigns for peak

engagement rates.
The following buyer persona is an example from
• Publishing content and advertisements on the
SmartBug Media of a buyer persona who is an advocate for
channels (email, social media) most frequented
social change, used by a mobile app company. By incorporating
by your buyer persona.
both tangible facts and emotional aspects of “Andy” the
• Align messaging to promote brand unity and marketing team is able to gain a more complete view of who
increase brand awareness. Andy is and how he will act as a consumer.
• Personalize your marketing automation efforts.

• Refining your copywriting to reflect improved

SEO strategies.

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 Buyer Personas for Sales
Knowing your buyer is never more important than when you are selling to them. From the start of
every potential customer interaction to the end of each successful one, the way in which you sell to
a buyer is dependent on what you know about them from their buyer persona.

To operate from a person-driven sales

strategy, use your buyer personas to:

• Craft emails, phone calls, and face-to-face

interactions with potential buyers based on
their persona.

• Help build rapport with potential customers

• Understand your prospective buyer on a deeper

level that allows you to be better prepared to
address their concerns.

• Guide the messaging sales representatives use Source: Munro

with customers.

• Educate your sales team on each different

persona to prepare them to work with any Check out this buyer persona used by Munro. This buyer
type of buyer. persona goes the extra mile by including a fictionalized quote
from the persona herself as well as actual quotes from past
• Teach sales representatives to better recognize
Munro customers. The more details you include in your
the unique pain points of each persona so they
personas, the better you are setting your teams up for
can address them effectively.
success in the long run.
• Increase win rates for your sales team.

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 Buyer Personas for Customer Service
Just because you’ve closed a sale doesn’t mean you have finished your relationship with your buyer.
Oftentimes, what transitions a one-time buyer into a repeat customer is their interactions with your
organization after they have made a purchase. To set your customer service team up for success,
involve them in the buyer persona development process so they can tailor their customer service
model to each persona.

To use this persona-driven strategy to

improve your customer service experience:

• Involve your customer service representatives

in the buyer persona creation process to gain
their invaluable insights.

• Gain a deeper understanding of the day to day

life of each persona.

• Reflect on how marketers and sales teams use

each persona to create a holistic approach to
each new customer.

• Train on the specific problems your customers

are trying to solve to be better prepared to
solve them.

• Use empathy and compassion to best support

your customers based on their persona.

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NEGATIVE PERSONAS
Negative personas are people who you don’t want
to use your product or service. They may be too
advanced or too junior to be a good fit for your
current goals or future growth strategy. In the
example on the right, a negative persona may be
someone who is an introvert who is not tech-savvy,
since they wouldn’t benefit from their product or
service, and thus have a bad experience. Source: Fake Crow

Check out the above persona example from Fake Crow of a store
manager. By incorporating scales and bar graphics, they visually
show this buyer’s needs and personality in comparison to other
potential buyers. This is a great way to add in negative personas
for your team to use.

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How to Make Buyer Personas
Now that you know the why behind creating buyer personas, it’s time for the how. In reality, a buyer persona is
the person you think about when you create content, respond to a support ticket, or try to speak a new prospect’s
language. In practice, you can create customized slide decks outlining the motivations and challenges of your
ideal buyer personas then easily share with all teams in your company.

GOOGLE SLIDES TEMPLATES POWERPOINT TEMPLATES

Instructions Instructions
To customize the templates in Google Slides, click the link To customize the PowerPoint slides, click File > Save As and
to open the Slides file. Then, click File > Make a Copy to rename the file to save a new version of the slides. Edit to your
create your own, editable version of the slides, and replace company’s needs and delete any templates you don’t need to
the prompts with your own buyer persona information. create a deck of your customized buyer personas.

Download Google Slides Templates Download PowerPoint Templates

Once you’ve created your own version of

the templates on either Google Slides or
PowerPoint, it’s time to start customizing
to your company and needs.

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 TEMPLATE 1

General Buyer Persona 1

Download Powerpoint Template Download Google Slide Template

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 TEMPLATE 2

General Buyer Persona 2

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 TEMPLATE 3

B2B Marketing Buyer Persona

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 TEMPLATE 4

B2C Advertising/Media Buyer Persona

Download Powerpoint Template Download Google Slide Template

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 TEMPLATE 5

Sales Buyer Persona

Download Powerpoint Template Download Google Slide Template

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 TEMPLATE 6

Technology/Product Buyer Persona

Download Powerpoint Template Download Google Slide Template

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 HubSpot Users: You can add your
personas right in HubSpot and track
personas within the tool. Here’s how.
Ready to Scale Your
Marketing Efforts?
Conclusion HubSpot has the tools you need to learn more
about your target audience and existing customers,
Buyer personas are a living document that
giving you actionable insights to grow better.
should be continuously reviewed in order to
allow it to grow and evolve alongside your
company. Creating effective buyer personas HubSpot Marketing Hub features include:
takes time and attention. By incorporating your
marketing, sales, and customer service teams in Blog
the persona development process you will gain
SEO
a more complete view of each type of buyer
you will meet down the road. Ad tracking + management

Social media management

Customized reporting dashboards

Marketing analytics

Get started

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