5 Easy Steps To Creating Buyer Personas For Your Small Business

Buyer persona

In our last piece, I explained what a buyer persona is and the benefits of buyer personas for your small business. This week, I’ll be taking a close look at how to create buyer personas in 5 easy steps without feeling like you are writing your final exams.

“Buyer personas are often met with opposition because they’re a lot of work to assemble, and once assembled they are living, evolving things and must be maintained. Like people, buyer personas change over time with the market, the times, the ebbs, and flows of products and services. They absolutely require work, but they are entirely worth it.”

Justin Gray, Marketing Profs

HOW TO CREATE PERSONAS IN 5 EASY STEPS

STEP 1 – INTERNAL REVIEW

As a small business owner, you do not have a sales team, service team, or marketing team to have conversations with, around buyer personas. You are your own sales representative. You take care of your marketing and possibly other aspects of your business. This alone can overwhelm you and make you feel like you need to ignore identifying and creating personas.

On the contrary, this makes the process easier because if you are convinced buyer personas are essential for your small business, you have all the resources you need at hand. If other people work as part of your business team, you need to bring them into the conversation, make them understand who buyer personas are, why they are essential for your business, and how they can be of help to identifying your key audiences.

Whether it is just you or you have team members, you want to get answers to crucial questions that will unearth valuable information. These include,

  • Types of customers you interact with in your business
  • The reasons why these customers purchase your products or services
  • The reasons your customers give for choosing your business over others in the same field
  • The common objections you encounter when trying to close sales with potential customers
  • The frequently asked questions customers ask
  • The information you have about your prospects and customers
  • The things customers say about your products

STEP 2 – CONVERSATIONS WITH CUSTOMERS

The next step would be to hear directly from customers to validate the information you have from step 1 and ensure you are on track. When you speak with customers, you want to elicit information that gives you a comprehensive and clear picture of their behavior, their challenges, and the solutions your products or services provides for them.

To do this, you’ll need to look at some of your previous or repeat customers and select those you’ll be interviewing. To ensure objectivity, focus on talking with customers from different backgrounds and buying situations.

If possible, interview customers who have bought from you, customers who contacted you and didn’t buy anything, and customers who chose the competitor over you. This helps you get objective answers and also enables you to evaluate your offerings.

STEP 3 – DATA COMPILATION

Once you have the information from the first two steps, it’s time to compile the data you have into a meaningful piece. The data should be presented in such a way that anyone who comes across it can make sense of the information therein.

There are several ways to compile buyer persona data, but you want to focus significantly on,

  • Group name: The information collated, although from different customers, will share similarities. Once you see a group with similar details and attributes, group them with a name. The name could be based on their profession, attributes, or an imaginary name if you’d like to get creative.
  • Description – As part of your grouping, you want to describe each group’s behavior and demographics. After choosing a group name, you should provide additional information about the challenges of the group, how and why they purchase your products or services, and other information that provides insights on how to get the group to buy from you.
  • Visual Identifier – Although using visual identifiers is optional, it helps to have a visual representation for each group. For example, you can choose to use stock images if they tally with the group’s descriptions, create an illustration or use the picture of a customer (if they agree to it).
  • Traits – For each persona group that you’ve identified, point out the qualities that set them apart from other groups. This makes it easy for you to craft content targeted to each persona for best results.

STEP 4 – IDENTIFY NEGATIVE PERSONAS

The beauty of going through the buyer persona process is that it helps you identify your ideal target audience and opens your eyes to customers who are not suitable for your business.

From all the information collected, take your time to flesh out personas you do not want to work with or personas who would be a bad fit for your business. Detail their information and traits so that you can identify them once you come in contact with them.

Creating negative buyer personas will save you time, money, reputation, and resources.

STEP 5 – ALIGN DEVELOPED PERSONAS WITH YOUR BUSINESS

It’s not enough to create personas. It is better to use them in your business. Once you have this information fully interpreted and your buyer personas developed, you want to start using this knowledge in your sales, marketing, customer support, and content development.

With persona knowledge, the sales process is fluid because you know what is valuable and what is not to the customer. In addition, your content marketing moves to a whole new level because you can create content targeted at the personas for your business, and customer support can introduce features that your buyer personas will find pleasing.

CONCLUSION

On the outside, buyer personas is a term that seems to be thrown around, which many business owners find confusing. However, with these easy and detailed steps, you’ll discover that buyer personas are pretty easy to develop for your small business while offering significant improvements in how you conduct your business for best results.

Latifat Abifarin

Latifat Abifarin

I am passionate about growth for businesses through creative and engaging content.

I specialize in creating custom, creative and engaging content for businesses. My goal is to help entrepreneurs and businesses increase their brand awareness, brand reach, visibility, and sales through creative and engaging content.

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