7 Reasons Why You Need to Create Buyer Personas and How to Do That

There’s another term connected with buyer personas – a user persona. It’s especially important in UX design and software development as it is a representation of a person for whom we’re designing the project.

The goal is the same – it’s still about understanding the persona, but the main aim is to understand why (for what purpose) and how the persona will use your app. However, in the case of user persona you should reveal all the behavioral patterns and barriers or problems user persona might have using the app. Having a user persona allows us to reduce the self-referential effect and focus on the specific needs of users, which results in better-suited solutions and cost reduction.

If you’ve made a conclusion that not every buyer persona will be a user persona, you’re right. Buyer personas define your customers, who do not necessarily must be users (especially in the B2B case). In the case of B2C, it’s more probable that the buyer persona reflects the user persona but doesn’t have to (e.g. children might choose and install an app for their parents, but those are the latter who will use it; that also works in other direction – parents can install an app in their children’s phones to monitor their activities).

Although the goal is slightly different, it’s still about learning about and understanding particular people, their motivations and behaviour. The process of developing buyer personas and user personas is similar, so you can follow the further steps (and adjust them to your needs).

When you know that you need to focus on real people with real problems and challenges, you need to define what you want to know about them. The questions you should ask might differ depending on whether you offer a B2B or B2C product or service.

Buyer personas in B2B

When your target customers are companies (and you’ve defined the ICPs), you need to define the decision-makers. I bet there will be more than one decision-maker, and you should describe all of them. Although you might hear voices that it’s unnecessary and there’s no need to describe all people who are involved in the purchase (it’s true), it’s crucial to understand the main ones, the decisive buyer personas you need to convince.

How many buyer personas you should create is entirely up to you. You need to base it on qualified leads, your existing customer base, demographic data, marketing campaigns or your target customers you’ve never met before. In order to do that you need to define the process of taking decisions and detail the roles of people who take a key part in it. You will end up having multiple personas, and that’s exactly what you need.

Roles

There are several roles sales teams encounter before they close a deal. An initiator is a person who shows interest in your product or service and tries to convince others it’s worth using it. They might consult their ideas with potential users (who might be influencers simultaneously as they might have a persuasive power and appropriate position in the company structure).

You can expect there’s a CFO who consents to expenses and an approver or a chief who will make a final decision. There are always people who will block the app implementation, so you need to be prepared to counter the counter-arguments (that’s jour job when it comes to communication strategy). When you define them, you’re ready to communicate with them for the best sales result.

Company’s details

If you defined the ICPs, you might already know that but if not, determine the buyer persona’s company’s details, like how big the company is (in terms of the number of employees or revenue) and in what industry it operates.

What you need to know about all those people (buyer personas) is not only who they are in the company structure, their goals and challenges, but you also need to reveal their motivations to use your product or service and blockers that might affect your cooperation.

You need to discover how your product or service impacts their job, solves their problems, supports them with coping with challenges and corresponds with their priorities. Every decision-maker might have a different approach and communication preferences that you need to take into account building your marketing strategy.

Then the hardest part. You should describe the motivation that pushed them to use your app and their needs or the problem to solve. Indicate why they decide to use your app and for what purpose. Remember that buyer personas also give you insight into core features (and from what you can resign in the case of MVP). Remember to describe the main business goal if your clients are companies.

Personal details

Although you should focus on business aspects, you should not lose sight of their personal details like demographics, interests and habits. I suggest you go through the same characteristics you would in the case of B2C customers and buyer personas (which you’ll find below).

Remember that business decisions are not only rational, and emotional aspects have a huge impact, too. Moreover, knowing their demographics and personal preferences is helpful for planning which formats, media, channels and marketing messages you should use to reach them.

Buyer personas in B2C

When you’re focused on individuals rather than companies, you need to know with whom you’ll communicate. You need to know who these people are. Are they women or men? What age? What countries do they live in? Do they live in a city or a village? What education do they have? Where do they work and in what character (job title, level in structure etc.) or how much do they earn. You might be interested in whether they have a partner or spouse or have children and what age. Do they have a house or a car? All those might be important, depending on your product or service.

Interests

Another aspect is what they like. Whether they are interested in music, going to the theatre or cinema? How do they shop, online or traditionally? Do they have a lot of friends? How do they spend time with them? What are they doing in their spare time? Do they have much time for themselves, or are they always under pressure? Are they under constant stress? To create buyer persona you need to go through all of these, even the less obvious characteristics. The more thorough your buyer persona research is the more specific the final outcome gets.

Values

Every person has values, and your brand needs to resonate with those. Try to understand their point of view, which will help you to create a unique value proposition. Are they eco-friendly? Keep that in mind designing your brand identity.

Habits

It’s also important to know what habits they have. Whether they read books or ebooks? How often do they use a mobile phone? What for? What apps do they use? How proactive are they using them? How do they contact their friends, do they use video calls or chats in apps? Do they use social media? Which ones? When? In what contexts? Describe all potential points of contact with your company. That means: where they might search for solutions to their problem or fulfilling their needs. At this stage, it should be quite easy.

Barriers and fears

Remember that there are always some barriers and fears because of which your end users might not want to use your app. Try to define those and address them in your communication. It’s extremely important, especially for B2B companies and high-valuable B2C goods.

Try to establish why they finally decided to purchase your app. What was the trigger? How did they make the decision?

The questions you ask are fully dependent on your offer, but there’s always one goal: get to know the target audience in the best way possible. Why?

1. Focus efforts of all departments on one common goal

When you define buyer personas and agree on the company’s priorities, you’re ready to focus all cross-department efforts on reaching them. That increases effectiveness and decreases costs as everyone concentrates on the same aim.

When you create a buyer persona it makes it easier for everyone that is working on your common goal. As you know, sales lead generation requires tailored marketing efforts of various kinds and a joined cooperation of sales and marketing teams. This way your strategy can appeal to your future or existing customers as it goes right up their alley.

2. Build the best product possible

When you know the target audience, you can adjust your product or service to their needs and preferences. You can focus on what’s really important and omit elements that are not noticeable by the groups you’re company is focusing on.

The better the product suits the audience, the more attractive and desired it is.

Besides the best-suited offer, you also cut unnecessary costs connected with extending or adjusting the offer (e.g. when it comes to building an app).

3. Plan the communication strategy right

When you know precisely who you want to reach and know what means of communication they use, you can plan your activities properly. You can reach the right people at the right time through the right channels via the right content.

Because of deep knowledge and understanding, you can decrease the costs of creating content by focusing on what really matters at each stage of the potential customers’ journey and discussing their pain points.

4. Speed up the clients’ decision-making process

You can shorten the time needed to close a deal if you define buyer personas properly. That happens because you can provide them with relevant content exactly when they need it, thanks to a communication strategy adjusted to their preferences.

That also gives you an opportunity to build content that refutes objections and counter-arguments.

5. Decrease marketing costs

When you don’t know the target audience, you can do nothing, but experimenting and experimenting mean losing money. When you know your potential customers, you can reach them via ads more precisely and, therefore, spend less money, having better outcomes.

6. Increase the ROI

Investing money in marketing, you expect that to bring money. Lower costs and better results mean higher ROI, but not only. A perfectly matched product or service that resonates with customers’ values means you can gain more loyal customers and increase customer lifetime value. That means a higher income in the long run.

7. Gain “free” marketing channels

Happy customers are more loyal, and loyal ones become ambassadors who tell the world how great a product or service you have. It’s not totally free, as you need to put a lot of effort and money into making them feel that way, but when you succeed, you set a self-propelled wheel that can bring new customers via whispering marketing.

Now you know what buyer personas are (and what they are not). Great! But that was the easy part of the process. Now, we need to define some. How to do that?

As you probably guessed, creating buyer personas is a process. It’s not about preparing an artificial portrait of a person (which is often confused with) but fully understanding of types of your potential customers or end-users.

For this reason, we need to take care of the following:

1. research phase (gathering data)
2. segmentation
3. narration
4. understanding
5. usage.

You need to define who your buyer personas are, how they behave and what problems they have. If you already have an app or website which you’re upgrading or redeveloping (or adding a new feature), you have a lot of valuable data to be researched.

Defining buyer personas from scratch is harder, that’s obvious. If you don’t have an app and former clients yet, you might feel trapped. You need to define something intangible with no help from your team or experience. But there’s a way to do that.

Now, let’s take a look at each of the stages mentioned above.

Research phase (gathering data)

The final outcome is always as accurate as the input data. For this reason, you need to pay a lot of attention to how you collect information that will be processed in the next stages.

Buyer personas are not something you’ll be able to define during one workshop, even if it would last a whole day. Whatever people you’ll gather there, you’ll receive only a partial portrait of potential clients. So, how to build a comprehensive and reliable one?

You can use different methods to understand your potential clients. It’s up to you and your business (and its goals) which you’ll decide to use:

1. Talk with colleagues who are in touch with customers
2. Analyse existing data (website analytics, CRM, Marketing Automation software)
3. Check competitors’ websites and communication
4. Interview your current clients
5. Ask prospective customers
6. Use referrals to find people outside your company
7. Ask 3rd parties for support

Talk with colleagues who are in touch with customers

It’s the best starting point to talk with people inside your company that have contact with clients at every stage of their cooperation with your company.

A sales team

You should talk with your sales team, as they are in touch with leads, prospects and, in many cases, current clients (target customers). They must know much about customers’ pain points or needs that your product or service addresses and be able to define what works best in terms of convincing them and what objections they have.

Salespeople can help you answer some of the following questions:

• Were the most valuable clients inbound or outbound leads?
• Who was the person they talked with at the beginning of the relationship?
• What role did they have? Did they manage people or were managed?
• How many people were involved in the negotiations? Who were they?
• Who was the final decision-maker?
• What questions did they ask during the negotiations?
• What level of knowledge did they have at the time of contact?
• Why they needed your product/service? How they intended to use it?
• What obstacles or worries they had about your solution/product?
• What words did they use? Any special?
• What did clients say about the product or service while using it?
• They can share some insights into the demographics information – age, sex, country etc.
• Did they have families? How important were they for them?
• Did they reveal their hobbies? What was that?
• Share any additional information that seems relevant.

You can add more detailed questions about your existing customers or even detect some aspects specific to your product or service that was not mentioned above. Treat it like a starting list of questions (or one of those buyer persona templates) that might open the unknown for you and brings to mind thousands of new question ideas to ask.

Talking with your sales team, let them speak freely. Avoid writing, it’s harder and enforces to build smooth sentences which might be disrupting. Talking is natural and easy, and has one huge advantage – you can immediately ask for clarification if something is unclear. Remember to record those talks to be able to return to them later.

To understand your clients it’s best for you to be present at least at some real meetings to listen and note, but it’s not always possible. Encourage your sales (or support team, see below) to write down all customers’ sentences, even trivial ones. Those are the most valuable sources of buyer persona content inspiration because they allow you to respond to real problems expressed in a natural way. Those sentences should be written down as they were told, without polishing the language. It might be a clue to understanding your customers and creating buyer personas.

Support team

Apart from the sales team, the support team is the one that might have the vastest knowledge about people’s pain points (especially if you offer a digital product).

There are a lot of questions you can ask them:

• What are the most common problem people face?
• What are the most serious ones?
• Who contacts them? Are there any groups that have the most problems?
• What additional information about their goals and needs do people reveal?
• What do people need? What is lacking? Why?

Other people that have contact with clients/leads

You should also talk with other people who might have contact with clients – a marketing team can share campaign results and insights, they also might meet leads or customers during some events (digital or traditional ones), technical people who took part in conferences or even instructors who conduct some seminars or learning sessions and can discuss with clients freely about their problems or needs.

Talk with your team, too, even if they are not in close relationships with clients. They won’t have any knowledge about your clients but have some from their perspective. You should gather all that suggestions and test them. For example. someone might tell you that a flight booking app is used by sons and grandsons to book grandparents’ flights. You don’t know that, but you have a hint. Who knows, maybe a good one?

The catalogue of potential sources of information is open, so feel free to set up your own. Keep in mind, however, that every person might have a slightly different view of them, and those, combined, might enrich your buyer persona profiles.

Although to define them properly, you need more than just the best impressions of your employees (which are priceless, of course, but insufficient). There are other sources of data you should try out.

Analyse existing data

I bet you have more data about your customers than you expect. You have website analytics that might provide you with some insight into what people are looking for, how they use your website (or app), what they’re downloading or what they search for. Check your analytics tools to find out the demographic traits, interests and habits (you may discover when those groups use your app) or pain points. Check languages (if it’s multinational) and analyse behaviour and conversion rate in analytics and marketing automation tools. You should also try to investigate social media channels and profiles.

You can also benefit from your CRM and marketing automation data by checking the profiles of the most valuable clients. You can discover what a particular persona did before they contacted you (or you reached out to them), what messages resonated with them and caused a reaction and check who they are using social media. You can even read the whole communication and notes made by the sales team. Based on those data, you might even have some overall preliminary conclusions.

Every fact might matter. If you have a productivity solution, you might check the most visited pages (including your blog posts) to discover what grabs people’s attention or conclude what problems they face the most commonly based on help centre content.

Another good source of knowledge is science. Search for research that investigates relevant correlations and tests them out.

Check competitors’ communication

All the hints mentioned above are great if you already have a solution running or clients, but what if you’re just about to start your business? Or want to extend the base of prospective clients? It turns out that competitor analysis is a perfect solution for both well-established and brand-new businesses.

If you don’t have much historical data or knowledge onboard, you can assume that your competitors do. You already know who your competitors are, so you can investigate their websites, social media and other channels and materials to discover to whom they speak. Investigate what they are posting about and to whom and how they speak. If they have clients, they must do something right. Learn from them.

If this imaginary profile reflects through several companies’ communication strategies, you might assume it might be the one you’re looking for.

By doing this, you can find some clues about who those people are, what values they have and how they make their decisions. That needs some research skills, but you can handle it.

You can do such an analysis by waiting down the main elements of their offers:

• what benefits do they highlight
• what objections do they address
• what language do they use
• what they are writing about on their blog
• what knowledge they assume their audience already has

You might once discover that some aspects are common and similar, and that’s something you should really focus on.

However, don’t resign from specific elements as they might be helpful in understanding the audience and give your some clues for further analysis.

Interview your current clients

The best results you’ll get if you conduct an interview (a survey is less precise and might be tricky), but I know it’s not always possible. However, if you would like to try, be careful. You might be surprised by how easy it is to change the outcome, e.g. simply because of changing the order of the questions.

Clients are always reliable sources of information but might not be representative. Why?

First of all, visitors to your website went a long road to becoming happy clients that agree to talk with you (unhappy might not want to talk or might grumble). That means you can’t be sure whether their approach is common for every people in their positions in similar companies that are not your customers (if you’re a B2C company, it’s even less probable). You might miss all the other people that you lost but still might be good clients.

Maybe that’s something you do or don’t do that you are able to convince this group but not another? Without analysing other people, you won’t get an answer.

In the People outside the company section, you’ll find questions you might ask during such an interview. Not all of them will be suitable to ask your current clients, so feel free to adjust the list to your needs.

Ask prospective customers

The prospects category is broader and more diversified than the group of your clients, which means it might provide you more information. Remember, however, that it’s still a group that was convinced enough to talk with you and be interested in buying your solution.

There’s nothing wrong with investigating such a group, but there’s a risk that you might reinvent the wheel. When you focus on people who are in a special category for you (like clients or almost clients), you might conclude that everything you do is right and perfectly matched to the target audience. That might be true, but that also means that you might overlook better-fitted opportunities simply because you focus on one group instead of a certain persona that could be your golden potential customer.

Focusing on internal knowledge and sources only, you might miss the opportunity to adjust and improve the offer for new, maybe perfect audiences. So, what to do to have a wider picture?

People outside your company

There are two main ways to deal with that problem. You can search for people who seem a good match and interview them or outsource this to an external agency.

In this case, you might conduct research on people who might be different from your clients or even might choose a competitive solution. You can explore new markets, new audiences and new possibilities or understand current ones more deeply.

In the case of total strangers, we have never talked with before, it’s important to remember that they should be rewarded for their attendance in such research (incentives). They should be also made fully aware it’s not a sales call but a target personas research – remember that you need to gain their acceptance. You also must remember the sample size and its variety and carefully prepare the questions you ask (including why- questions).

In most cases, if you don’t have a researcher onboard that knows what questions to ask and how they affect the answers, it might be better to entrust an external company with your buyer personas. An agency will set up a workshop with you to understand your goals and then design objective research that will provide you with reliable insight into the possibilities you have. They might not only define and take a sample and interview the right people but also go through all the following steps of building buyer personas.

They can conduct marketing research like interviews and focus groups to find out what the target group thinks about your product or service and how likely it is to use it. This kind of research is great when it comes to verifying pieces of communication strategies of marketing and sales teams.

Questions to ask

Below you’ll find some questions that will help you to gain the most of the interview (including demographic information).

Treat them like inspiration and adjust to your needs and goals. Let people speak freely and ask additional questions if you discover something relevant or interesting.

1. What does your company specialise in? What industry is it?
2. How does this industry differ from others? What’s the most challenging?
3. How big is the company?
4. How did your career path look?
5. Why you ended up here? How long have you been here?
6. What is your educational background? Level of education, schools, the field of study?
7. How old are you (might be the range or closed question)?
8. What are your job title and responsibilities?
9. What skills and knowledge are needed to cope with your responsibilities?
10. Who’s your supervisor? Whom do you manage?
11. How do you know you’re successful in your position?
12. What achievement you’re proud of the most?
13. What are your key success indicators and KPIs?
14. What are your main challenges? What are you struggling with?
15. What do you worry about?
16. Do you think that {description of the product or service} could solve your problems? How?
17. What does your day look like? Which part do you like/don’t like the most?
18. What tools do you use to do your job?
19. How do you gather or learn things you need to do your job?
20. Where do you look for such information?
21. What formats suit you best: texts, graphics, videos, podcasts?
22. If you need a vendor or product, do you use the internet to look for them? How and where do you search for them?
23. How do you prefer to contact potential vendors (email, phone, video call, or in person)?
24. What is the biggest fear that discourages you from cooperation or buying a product?
25. Describe the recent purchase or cooperation
    1. How did you define the need?
    2. Where were you looking for information?
    3. Why did you decide to purchase/cooperate?
    4. How did you evaluate vendors?
    5. Who took part in the decisive process (job titles)?
    6. Why did you decide to cooperate with the vendor?
26. What are social networks important to you? Do you use them for work?
27. How about your private life, are you married or have children?
28. Where do you live, in an urban, suburban or village area?
29. What do you do for fun? What hobbies do you have?
30. What values do you cherish (ecology, family, self-development etc.)?

Segmentation

When you collected the data from your buyer persona research, you need to segment people into categories based on similarities, goals or challenges. You might need to use industries or job descriptions as clues for segmentation. Segment people by categories that matter and change something – the way they look for contractors, how they make decisions or what problems they face.

The goal is to group information and people you learned about into similar groups with common problems, needs or decisive patterns etc. that will become categories.

You can realize that there are some categories that are not fully described and might need additional data. That’s ok. You don’t need to describe all possibilities now, but the most valuable one (you can always get back to the subject and gain more information later). Keep in mind, however, to have an eye on decisive people.

You can also define negative buyer personas, people whom you don’t want to cooperate with (but you don’t need that many details, obviously).

Many people will advise you to build a portrait of a buyer persona with a name, picture and traits to make it more personal, but it’s not the best fit for me. It’s easy to forget that people might slightly differ within a group if it comes to family life or hobbies, so I prefer to describe the group by numbers (I know, it’s rather a scientific approach, but I find it more reliable).

That means I describe all common aspects for the group and then add additional elements like variables, e.g. all researched marketing managers live in large cities, work in the marketing field for more than 5 years and have a CTO above them but not everyone has a family (68% does), some of them are before their thirties (27%) and 80% doesn’t use TikTok (which means, 20% does). That gives me a better insight into a varied group and helps to make informed decisions. Those should be, however, less important variables that don’t affect the story, goals and challenges. Although some people call them micro personas, I prefer to gather them as data and not lose the comprehensive portrait. It might be reasonable to create micro-buyer personas (sub-personas) in more complicated cases.

Narration

Now, for every segment, for every buyer persona you have to create a deeper narration. Try to describe (based on facts only) what they are facing, play their roles and put on their shoes. Build situations and scenarios they might be part of and need to deal with. It’s about stories that lead to deeper…

Understanding

Building buyer personas is about understanding. Now, you know the problems and stories behind them, so you need to define the deeper challenges that might not be visible at first glance and the goals that are common for this segment/buyer persona.

That might also be an inspiration for additional research to verify your statements and assumptions. You might create a focus group with one buyer persona representative to discuss the most important challenges and understand that deeper. It’s up to your goals, needs and imagination.

Usage

Think who might benefit by using buyer personas – your marketing department, sales team, support – everyone who needs a better understanding of clients. Your sales process and marketing efforts will thank you later!

Let’s say you are going to develop a parental app from scratch, and you don’t have any insight yet. Now we’ll try to build a buyer persona by simply guessing, but you should do proper research first.

Who decides to use such an app? We’re looking for some ideas. Check social media, fora and other accessible sources. Those are probably women, in their 20s and 30s (let’s say between 25 and 35). Probably well-educated, who care for their unborn babies from the very beginning and are keen on reading some guides. Those might be women who look for natural cosmetics and don’t wear makeup anymore (at least for now). There might be no difference where they live or when they work (or maybe better-educated women care more? You need to define this).

Now, when you have an idea, it’s good to reach real people and ask them a few questions (you’ll find them in the People outside your company section). You should approach this like scientific research: select the probe, prepare the research, collect buyer persona data and analyse. I know that when it comes to collecting data we can do that indefinitely, but as a researcher, I’ll give you a hint: it’s time to stop when you are not discovering anything new.

I won’t describe here how to prepare the probe, how to run a reliable interview or conduct focused research. Now, just keep in mind that those elements can change the outcome completely.

Start from defining the basics like gender, age, level of education or living area and try to reach people from all those groups. When you need to know their personal opinion, I suggest conducting an interview, and setting focus groups when you already have some basic ideas tested (as those are more expensive).

Interviews will help you to find or test assumptions about additional variables that might help you to distinguish the best-fitted people. It might turn out that being eco-friendly or eco-aware is important or that it’s about whether it’s their first or second child. During the interviews, you probably will see patterns that will help you to focus on the right people (or the best-suited ones, as you’re just starting).

Aside from who your buyer personas are, you need to discover what is their main goal. Probably to raise a healthy and strong child, but not only. That might also be to feel like a good mother, release themselves from boring duties (like monitoring food amount or poop frequency), react immediately when something happens and provide their children with appropriate care. That gives you an insight into features – you might need an in-app society or blog, aside from the main childcare function.

Investigate the values. Probably at this stage family is the most important one, but try to find out what about eco-friendliness, healthcare, education, professional success and so on.

Don’t be afraid to ask them whether they need such an app and how it might help them with daily duties (or not, that’s what you need to find out). Let them speak freely and listen.

Where may they look for solutions (to track feeding sessions, poops and so on)? Probably on fora or on social media, where they ask questions or look at how to solve their problems or make lives easier. They might find out about apps like yours by accident. Then they might research the mobile app stores and search engines to find the right app. You should know that.

The most important barriers might be price (children are expensive, so do they have spare money to spend on an app?) and simplicity of usage (they don’t have much time to click thousands of tiny buttons or go through hundreds of screens).

When do those people decide to buy an app? Right before the labour or earlier? You need to know this to define where to reach them with marketing messages.

How would they choose the best app? How to make them choose yours from all the uploaded to app stores? How to convince them to stay longer and use the app? Those might be good questions for a focus group discussion as they might bring more insight and ideas.

When you have all the data, you need to segment your potential buyer personas, understand the stories behind them and their challenges. You need to understand their lifestyle (or future lifestyle after the child is born, which might be another good idea for a focus group) and obstacles to define how to reach them and when.

When you can easily describe a few categories of clients with all those details, congrats! You have your buyer personas.