Buyer Personas: Marketing in the Voice of your Buyers, Not Your CEO

Editor's Notes

1. Introduction to Buyer Personas-people are already using them
2. Introduction to Buyer Personas-people are already using them
3. Creating personas is a 6 step process. We’ll go through each of these 6 things you need to do to be successful in greater detail, but let’s start at the top with step 1:
4. If any of those assumptions are inaccurate, your persona will be, too. Save yourself the trouble and research first! photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/seeminglee/4556156477/">See-ming Lee 李思明 SML</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/">cc</a>
5. Although there are several methods, the best and most important one is to start by interviewing your customers, clients, donors, or students--after all, these people your customers for a reason! They’re going to have some great insights into who your personas really are.
6. This checklist, a copy of which you can download in the resources section below, covers the 7 main categories you’ll need information about to build your personas. On the right-hand side are some specific questions you can ask to actually GET this information. Examples of persona-building questions are: What does a typical day look like for your persona? What does success mean for them? What are they trying to accomplish? Where on the Internet do they go for information? The ”persona profile checklist” provides generic phrasing and questions to ask to build you personas. Feel free to tailor the questions as much -or as little - as needed to match your industry and the language used in it. 
7. So ... how do I actually make one? photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/emagic/56206868/">e-magic</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/">cc</a>
8. First, always focus on behaviors: don’t pay attention to WHAT someone is doing, pay attention to WHY they’re doing it. Understanding those motives is essential to creating a great persona, and it also gives you some predictive power! If you know not just what someone has done, but WHY they did it, you can use that to extrapolate what they might do or want to see next!
9. You can use whatever is easiest for you - excel, google docs, or even note-taking software like Evernote. Once you start to see trends in the data you’re getting, THAT’s when the time comes to enter that information into the buyer persona development worksheet. Remember- that worksheet is the framework each of your personas will be built off of! photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/sheeprus/4551642374/">Sheep"R"Us</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/">cc</a>
10. That’s where the Buyer Persona Development Worksheet listed in the resources section below comes in. You can use this worksheet to organize your research and make sure you’re getting all the information necessary to create a complete persona. Later on, this worksheet will also become the basis for your actual buyer persona(s)! Print out a persona development worksheet for each persona you think you have and use a different one compile information about each persona.
11. And lastly, the fourth persona building best practice is to tell your persona’s story. Your buyer persona shouldn’t be just be a fact sheet about your ideal customer—that’s not a persona, that’s a list. Instead, take those bullet points and weave them into a story that provides context and paints a relatable picture about exactly who your persona is.