One of the essential parts of all marketing to understand who you are trying to sell to. Without this crucial step in any marketing planning or strategy, you can easily be firing well off the mark when it comes to your messaging, the channels you choose, your buyer’s journey development and all of the processes in your lead generation methodology.
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a visual representation of your typical and ideal customer based on real information from your existing customer base and market research on your potential buyers.
The persona you identify provides a structure, context and a sanity check for all your marketing. Having one (or several) in place makes it easy to map out your marketing content, plan, allocate resources and achieve alignment across sales, service and marketing departments.
By understanding the challenges, goals, and typical demographics of your ideal customer you can set a strategy which is aimed at attracting them to your websites and then from your website in converting them into a customer.
How do you create a persona?
Fortunately, there are a number of free tools out there to help.
HubSpot – make my persona
Create your persona online by answering a series of profile questions about them and then download to a pdf to share with your team.
Hootsuite – persona template
Download a free template to easily craft a detailed profile of your ideal customer.
Smaply – map your customers’ experience
In addition to generating your customer personas, with smaply you can create and share customer journey and stakeholder maps too. (14 day free trial)
Userforge – personas and user stories
With a lot of customisation options, userforge enables you and your team to create personas for your buyers, user stories and a visually map how those stories relate to each other. The tool is end-to-end in mind thinking about your persona before they buy your solution and then their experience once they become and customer.
