6 Steps to Creating Accurate Buyer Personas

[Shakhawat]

The success of all inbound marketing and sales efforts hinges on the development of accurate and informed buyer personas. To effectively capture, nurture and convert prospects into customers, it's essential to first understand who you're talking to, what drives their purchasing decisions, what their unique challenges are in relation to your product/services and what types of messaging they're most likely to respond to.

In the B2B model, buyer personas can be leveraged to engineer database tailor a sales pitch to specific individuals within an organization, to more effectively and organically capture the attention of qualified leads, to foster greater brand awareness and site traffic through persona-specific campaigns and to seamlessly usher leads down your sales funnel at key conversion points.

To help jump-start your persona development process, we've laid out our proven six-step guide to persona creation:

1. Ask the Right Questions
Developing accurate buyer personas begins with asking the right questions to guide your efforts. Which markets are you developing personas for? Which of your company's solutions align with these markets? What is your current value proposition? What features do your prospects care about most? What position do they occupy within their organization? What are their daily concerns and responsibilities?

By evaluating traits and characteristics of specific buyers or markets you've had success selling to, and identifying commonalities therein, you can begin to sketch out a few potential buyer personas.

2. Consult Sales and Marketing
Asking the right questions also means asking them of the right people. Your sales team should be able to shed light on the key pain points, daily responsibilities and purchasing concerns of target personas, pulled directly from their one-on-one sales interactions. Your marketing team, on the other hand, may be more likely to identify key firmographic and demographic trends of personas along with their preferred engagement channels or web habits. Both perspectives are important; having sales and marketing members present for a persona workshop will help ensure you're not missing key insights from either team.