Ever heard of Tab?
Yeah, me neither. It’s just one of the 200 brands that Coca-Cola will be pulling the plug on this year.
Tab’s core messaging is based on 1963 market research that focused on an increasingly calorie-conscious postwar America. It mainly targeted American women who were anxious to stay attractive for their men returning from Vietnam, and sales of the diet drink rose rapidly.
However in 2017, Tab’s sales consisted of a meager 0.03% of Coke’s total revenue. Why?
Tab doesn’t speak to today’s consumers. We don’t want a zero-calorie drink that reportedly tastes “like bad medicine”, or to be told that it is “for beautiful people”. Put simply, Tab’s core messaging hadn’t been updated to suit our current tastes and consumer habits, which led to a near flatline in sales.
Brands lose relevance when they lose sight of who their consumers are. 81% of consumers want brands to get to know them and understand when to approach them and when not to.
And yet, a shocking 60-70% of B2B marketers admit that they don’t truly understand their buyers.
By not knowing who you are selling to, your sales team will be shooting arrows in the dark. Your buyer journey will be a messy, directionless tangle of vague steps and processes. And you certainly won’t know how to market your products and services, or how to improve on them later on.
So is knowing who your consumers are important? I’d say so. It’s the first step towards any sales funnel, marketing campaign or product development project.
And it starts by creating a buyer persona.
What is a buyer persona?
Have you ever played Secret Santa and found yourself in the undesirable position of buying a gift for someone you barely know?
Now you’re stuck, because you don’t know what they like or dislike, you don’t know their hobbies, habits or dietary requirements. So you end up getting a pretty boring and generic gift so that you don’t offend anyone. And in doing this, you end up wasting the chance of getting a gift they will actually love.
In the same way, businesses need to create products and services that their customers will love. The better you know your customers, the better equipped you are to serve them.
Think of a buyer persona as a guidebook that helps you and everyone on your team learn how to interact with your customers and keep them coming back to you. This is the start of building a personalised, intimate relationship with your consumers.
Your buyer persona should be based on research and data from your actual buyers, and represents their current wants and needs related to your product or service.
It represents a segment of your target market, to help you focus on who you should be selling to and making your product for. It shouldn’t be based on that one customer who walked into your shop or placed an order online, but rather exist as a summarised snapshot of the majority of your consumers.
How to create your buyer personas
There are typically four main steps to create your buyer personas:
Reviewing customer data
Interviewing customers
Building your Persona
Presenting your Persona
Let’s dive into each step in more detail.
Stage 1: Reviewing customer data
To start, you need to dig deep into any data and insight you have about your current customers.
Here’s where to begin:
Collect your customer list
Analyse from company POV
Analyse from consumer POV
Here’s how to do it.
Collect your customer list
Gather a list of all your paying customers, and include information that is relevant to your business. Knowing what data to include and exclude will save you a ton of time and effort.
For example, according to Marcia Riefer Johnston, more personal data of the customer (e.g. household income, pets, family details) are less valuable than the professional background (degrees and certificates, 20 years in Marketing) for B2B businesses.
Start by collecting basic demographic information, such as:
Company Name
Industry
Company Revenue
Country
City
You can also include how much revenue you make from each customers, such as:
Total Lifetime Value
Sales Conversion Rate
Average Spend per Transaction
Depending on your business, you can also review how engaged they are in your product and service by collecting metrics like:
Number of logins per month
Number of social media posts sent, cards created, etc (whatever you product does)
Site traffic & bounce rate
The goal is to get a bird's eye view of your current customer data and map out any existing trends and insights you will find, which we will do next.
Analyse from company POV
With this list and customer segment, you can break down your reviewed data even further by focusing on data such as:
Number of customers by country
Average revenue by industry
Number of customers by industry
Number of customers by job position
This is one way of finding hidden trends to see who your best customer segments are.
For example, after some digging you may find that your customers that pay you between $100 - $1000 per month only make up 10% of your customer base, but account for nearly half of your revenue.
These higher paying customers are the ones you should focus on. Use the data you have collected to then find out which industries they are from. If, for instance, they are from the Food & Beverage industry, that will become a key point in your buyer persona.
Analyse from customer POV
You should know who your ideal customer segments are. If we take the example above, that could be food & beverage companies with 100-1000 employees.
Now, it’s time to zoom in deeper and learn about them on an individual, customer-facing level. These are the people within these companies that you should be targeting.
The process remains the same -- you gather a list of customers from the food & beverage companies and list out information to form your buyer persona.
The list may include information like:
Gender
Age
Job title
Department
Seniority (Manager, Partner, etc)
In our example, let’s say we found that it is usually the Manager that uses and purchases the product. This becomes part of our Buyer Persona.
Analyse business and digital data
Analysing your web traffic using Google Analytics can also provide useful information about your existing and potential customers. These platforms offer insights about customers’ habits, interests, behavioral patterns and much more. If you’re new to this, it’s a good starting point before using other customer relationship management tools that can provide richer and more detailed data.
You can also look at your social media platforms and research its analytics too. For example, Facebook Audience Insights data can give you data on factors like demographics, activity, location and page likes that can support your findings from the collected customer list.
Stage 2: Interviewing the Customer
While it’s good to know who your target segments are, you need to really dive deep and hear their thoughts about your product and their buying process. Otherwise you’re working with a handful of metrics and data and not much else.
Your consumers are people, not numbers. There are a myriad of reasons why some choose to buy your product on a whim, and why others may consult friends, families and scour reviews before handing over their credit card.
Talking to them will help uncover any emotional biases or values that they have when choosing your product. This is a goldmine of information that no Google Analytics or consumer data can reveal.
Schedule the interviews
Who do you interview though? Finding the right people to speak to will be critical for building your buyer persona.
Here are a few sources you can use. Remember to base them off the initial research you’ve done to narrow down your selection:
Current customers
Your existing customer base is the perfect place to begin, as they are already engaged with your company. Mix things up by talking to customers who are both happy and unhappy with your product, to give your persona more dimension.
Your prospects
Interviewing your prospects and leads is another great option. While they may not know much about your brand, you can still gather any first impressions they have to figure out if it's a right fit for your persona.
Your referrals
If you are relatively new to the scene, relying on immediate networks such as your coworkers, social media contacts and friends is another great way to find people you’d like to interview.
Third-party networks
Another option is posting ads on sites such as Craiglist to find people who are happy to be interviewed for a small fee. While you will have less control over the sessions, it’s still a great starting point.
Reaching out to potential interviewees may be a little daunting at first, but here are some tips to get those response rates up:
Offer extra perks
Give people a reason to participate in your interview that benefits them. Gift cards, discounts, and exclusive content are some ways you can make it worth their while, especially if you are reaching out cold.
Make it clear this isn’t a sales call
Wording your email plays a big part here. You need to be clear that you are doing research, not trying to sell them something. If you aren’t sure where to begin, steal my email template here.
Make things easy for them
Don’t make your potential interviewees do the work here. Be flexible with the timing, and use appointment schedulers like Calendly to reduce the back and forth emails.
Conducting the interviews
Next up -- the interviews! I’d recommend scheduling more interviews that you need, as cancellations or no-shows are common. This way, you’ll still have a decent number to work with without having to re-look at your email list and start the whole scheduling process again.
Here are some questions to get you started. You can adapt them depending on what product or serving you are offering:
Can you describe your business? In particular, the size, location, primary expertise etc.
How does your role fit in the company?
What are the main goals and KPIs for your role?
What are the main pain points in your role?
What do you use our product to achieve?
How were you achieving this before using our product? What challenges occurred?
What is the main benefit from using our product?
What made you seek a solution like ours?
What is the biggest fear or concern about using our product?
What blogs, news sites or magazines are you reading to get professional information?
All these questions will help fill in the gaps or support the data and insights found during the first stage. They will help you discover:
Who is using your product
How your product is helping them achieve their goals
How your product is making their lives easier
How previous methods were ineffective before your product came along
Where your customers are getting information from
Any concerns they may have about your product
Also, consult sales & customer service teams to gather anecdotal evidence and determine what motivates each buyer to make a purchase. This will add more colour to your buyer persona too.
Write up the responses
After wrapping up the interviews, it’s time to document them properly. This part may be a little time consuming, but writing up a summary of each interview in a spreadsheet will go a long way. Try and do this right after each interview as the information is still fresh in your mind.
The spreadsheet will not only table all the responses in one document, but it will also help you segment answers based on data such as job title, industry, company size etc. Plus sharing the data with your team will be a lot easier to do too!
Step 3: Building the Personas
With your customer interviews and research done, you’re now armed with the information needed to flesh out your buyer persona.
The key information to include will depend largely on your business and its products or services. Some useful pointers (which directly relate to the interview questions) are:
About them
A summary of the customers, including demographic information such as their role, industry and company.
Use Case
How are they using your product and what they are trying to achieve with it?
Previous Solution & Common Objections
How were they achieving things before using their product? What pain points did it solve?
Benefits
How does your product make their lives easier, happier, more efficient etc?
Buying process
How did they end up choosing your product? What steps did they take to reach that decision?
Choice factors
A summary of things they would consider before purchasing a product like yours.
You can add or remove sections that are most relevant to you.
Stage 4: Presenting your Persona
Persona done, it’s now time to present it to the people and teams who will use them. Depending on how your organisation is structured, it can be useful to hold a meeting and present the buyer personas you created, along with key information and methodology used, to your company.
As a bonus tip, try adding a stock photo that you feel best suits your buyer persona. Having a face to a fictional name will really bring it home, and it will stick in peoples’ minds better. If you have an in-house design team, you can also get them to design custom illustrations to suit your personas too.
Segment and focus
71% of companies that exceed lead generation and revenue goals have documented buyer personas.
Understanding your target customers on a deeper level is a great way to ensure your brand is connecting with the customer segment that matters most. You don’t want to give them a generic, boring product that appeals to all and therefore to no one.
2PM Inc founder Web Smith shows how failing to know your consumers can affect your sales. Reebok is struggling to differentiate and deliver authenticity to its consumers, making the brand lag behind the likes of Nike and Adidas.
Trying to be everything for your customers doesn’t work when 86% of consumers say that authenticity is a key factor when deciding what brands they like and support.
Focusing on your buyer persona is a crucial element to being more transparent and consistent in your branding and messaging too. This will then influence everything else we have discussed, from sales funnels to product development.
Final thoughts
Buyer personas are the foundation for any marketing and product development efforts, and are crucial to making better business, marketing and product decisions.
Revisit your buyer personas every six months. Factors like data changes, fading trends, evolving buying habits and technology advancements will all likely have shifted in that timeframe.
Don’t forget to regularly track important changes in your industry, company, and product too, and make sure your buyer personas reflect these changes.
Your customers aren’t static, and neither should your buyer personas be! Invest the time and effort to gain real customer insight, and see long term gains and results.