How to Create Buyer Personas and Use them to Boost Sales

Do you know who are the target audience and buyers for your products? If yes, then how much do you know about them?
Buyer personas come in handy to define the ideal buyers of your products. They are a fictional representation based on the research and data you have collected. Buyer personas help you focus on the potential prospects. Also, you can guide the product development team to build a product in a way that suits the needs of your ideal customers perfectly.
By creating buyer personas, business owners can align all work from marketing to sales to services across the organization. The appropriate use of buyer personas will result in attracting high-value visitors, quality leads, and potential customers. Buyer personas help you to stick to the right audience you want to market and ultimately generate sales. But many business owners are confused about how to create buyer personas and use them to boost sales?
This is a million-dollar question every business owner needs an answer to and with this article we want to simplify the process of buyer persona creation. But before we dive into that, let’s understand why buyer personas are important?

Why Buyer Personas are Important for Your Business?

Buyer personas help business owners to understand their prospective customers better. By understanding the behavior, specific needs, and concerns of customers, you can personalize their experience with tailored content, products, services, and brand messaging.
Without knowing the interests, background, and every other data about your ideal customer, it becomes critical to develop detailed buyer personas. It requires strong research skills as well as insight from your existing customer base.

How to Create Buyer Personas for your Business?

Buyer persona creation involves interviews, surveys, and researching extensively to collect important data and insights about your ideal customers. Let’s first start with researching part.

1. Practical Methods to Research and Gather Information:

While researching about your buyer personas, look through your existing set of a customer database. Doing so will help you uncover insights on how your leads find, engage and consume your content.
Another way to collect information is to create forms with fields that capture important buyer persona details. Also, take note of the insights and feedback from your sales team they have collected while interacting with the leads. Is there any generalization they can make about those leads?
Your last resort is to get yourself on the wheel and interview the prospects to find out any helpful information to create buyer personas.
Once the research stage completes, you may have overwhelming raw data about your prospective customers. But what to do with it? How do you disintegrate it to make it understandable for all? Well, start looking for any patterns or commonalities and based on that start with persona creation.

2. Fill in the Demographic Details of Your Personas:

Next is to conduct surveys to collect basic information needed for persona creation. Conduct online, in person, or over the call surveys to ask for basic demographic details about your customers. Based on these surveys, define personas with some buzzwords or mannerisms you may have picked up.
This will make it easy for your team to identify buyer’s persona when they are interacting with your team.

3. Learn About Motivation Factors:

Once you start breaking down the big pieces of information about your buyers, you’ll come up with the motivation factors. This is where you will learn things about your personas from the “why” questions you have asked during surveys, research, and interviews. The most important thing is to tie all that information together.
Prepare your sales team for interviews with your customers to include some real quotes from them to exemplify personas. Try to find out what they are concerned about, who they are, what they do, and what they want. A list of objections they might raise will be helpful for your team to address them whenever they converse with buyers.

How to Start Researching About Buyer Persona?

To create buyer personas of ideal customers, it’s essential to find some people to talk to and interview. Interviewing people will help you understand what drives your customers to make purchases. But how do you find people to conduct interviews? Don’t worry. Because we have found few sources as to start your research.

1. Use Existing Customer Database:

Your existing set of customers is an excellent source for you to start conducting interviews. Why? Because they have already engaged with your brand and purchased goods from you. They perfectly fit into the category for creating a buyer persona.
Conduct interviews with your satisfied and unsatisfied customers. Both will have a different perspective to see your products and can give some insightful patterns that’ll help you create a solid understanding for persona creation.
Interviewing your existing customer is also beneficial as you don’t have to provide any incentive for it. They like to be heard and interview gives them a chance to say all about the challenges and what they feel about your products. Also, involving your existing customers may give them the inspiration to stick to your brand and become a loyal customer.

2. Use Prospects:

The leads/prospects you have are a great source to interview and understand their personas. Your current prospects or leads are those who haven’t purchased an item from you yet. Contact them using the data you already have and try to collect information if they fit into your buyer persona.

3. Use Third-party networks and Referrals:

Other than your existing customers and prospects, you may have to rely on third-party networks and referrals. You can interview such people who might fit into your buyer’s persona if you are moving into a new market where you don’t have any leads or customers. In that case, you can use your network like co-workers, social media contacts, etc.
It will be hard to get a large volume of people to interview at first but as you expand your network, you’ll get a high-volume of interviews. If you don’t know where to begin, try looking on LinkedIn and other similar platforms to find target personas. Also, you can use Craigslist to post ads for interested people to get in touch.

Questions to Ask in an Interview for Buyer Persona Creation

After you have sorted out where to research and how to create buyer personas, go through this useful list of questions that can come in handy while conducting interviews. You can customize these questions as per your need and add or remove anything.
1. What is the buyer’s age/gender?
2. What is their Job & Title?
3. How their typical day goes like?
4. How is the buyer’s job measured?
5. What skills they have to do their job?
6. Any particular tools they use?
7. Who reports to them & who do they report to?
8. What is the company size & revenue?
9. What is their gross income?
10. What industry or industries your company works in?
11. What are their responsibilities?
12. Do they feel successful in their job?
13. Any challenges they have faced?
14. How often do they shop online?
15. Where do they shop products mostly?
16. What are their motivation to buy products?
17. How do they like to be communicated?
18. What makes them feel frustrated?
19. Are they technically sound?
20. What are their accomplishments?
And many more which perfectly fit your business niche.

Wrap Up
In a nutshell, creating buyer personas are very helpful to boost your sales and revenue. They are crucial for any business to lead it through the path of success. Use the tips and insights mentioned in this article to create accurate buyer personas for your products. At first, you have to spend a bit of time in the research, survey, and interviews. Don’t be afraid to spend time and be thorough with it to get an accurate description of your buyer persona.
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About Hemant Parmar

Hemant Parmar is an eCommerce expert and a keen Magento consultant who specializes in meeting the needs of businesses in the e-commerce space. Years in the eCommerce market make him a perfect choice for sharing his expertise on eCommerce and Magento 2 development. He believes that customers need to be met no matter how challenging it might be.

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