By creating buyer personas, you can help determine your marketing strategy. This will allow you to identify who the buyers are, what they face, and most importantly, what they are trying to achieve.

What does it mean to be a marketing persona?

Marketing uses the term persona to refer to your ideal customer/customers. You can define them by any combination of these attributes or activities:

• Demographic
• Shopping habits
• Location
• job role/description
• Interest in product
• Product information is required

Marketing personas are fictional representations of actual users and are used in product development and product redesign.

Personas are crucial to the success and longevity of a product. They drive design decisions by taking into account common user needs.

Because it is difficult to target the right customers without knowing your buyer personas, it can be very difficult to develop a marketing strategy that will attract them. A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customers, their backgrounds, goals, and challenges. It is created using market research as well as real data from your existing customers. Marketing efforts and business growth are susceptible to failure if you don’t know your ideal customers.

Marketing is a fundamental part of their existence. Without them, it’s impossible to market anything.

Personas should be part of your marketing strategy to make better investments and decisions.

You don’t have to do it all at once if you aren’t sure where to start. There’s a good chance that you aren’t growing at the pace you desire or predicted, so it’s not too late.

Are there different types of marketing personas?

The marketing personas of a company can be very different from one industry to another, and even from one country to the next. Personas can be defined using many variables. It all depends on how businesses store and track data about potential customers.

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How do you create personas? Qualitative or quantitative research?

You can segment customers if you have the attributes of your customer before they arrive at your digital asset. You could also score them based on what they do on the site. This is also known as lead scoring.

It is important to not just divide them but to understand how each “group” behaves and interacts on the website/app to identify key trends. These trends can cross over groups, which allows you to connect them to form a larger group based on their behavior.

These are three ways to build your marketing personas using a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods.

1. Get your sales data, and then go crazy in Excel!

You can use your historical sales data to identify customers and their quantitative attributes. Understanding why these customers bought from you is crucial. The following attributes/activity should be considered:

• If you can cross-sell or upsell, it is a good idea to define low, medium, and high spending thresholds. This can help you to reward high spenders and incentivize those who spend less with discounts or offers.

• What is your job role? Do C-suite executives buy more from you than executives?

• Locality – Do certain areas spend more or less, buying particular products?

• Gender and age are common indicators of gen z, baby boomers, or millennials. These generations often have similar shopping habits.

• The days of the week: It’s always surprising to see how many people shop in one day. You might be surprised to learn that more people shop on weekends. But what about Monday mornings between 8 and 12? This is exactly the kind of shopping behavior we have seen in a client.

• You can buy single or multiple items. This will allow you to tailor messaging and target cross-selling opportunities.

• Country – Another location-based attribute, but shopping behavior can vary depending on where you are located.

While I don’t think you should create messaging for every marketing persona, if you can identify common themes across them, then you can make a persona.

2. Key activities that lead to success

Lead scoring simply means that you give each action on the site a certain amount of points, which corresponds to how important it is for your business.

This automation article explains how to create a simple spreadsheet with scores that can be attributed to different activities. These activities could include:

• Downloading

• If you are selling to the c-suite, filling out a form or filling it in with a specific field is valuable.

• Visit a page or a group of pages

• Viewing a video

• Subscribe to our newsletter. Unsubscribing is also important.

Once you have identified the actions that you wish to score on the site you can assign a score, which will lead to thresholds. These are typically broken down into the following scenarios:

• Cold lead = A person who has less than 100 points. This means that they are not interested in the subject and may only have been browsing briefly at the time.

• Warm lead = 100-200 Points – If you are interested and ready to buy, it may take longer but may just need a little push.

• Hot lead = More than 200 points – Ready to Buy and should be reached by the sales team to follow up.

These points and actions can be very helpful in defining your marketing personas.

3. Interview, interview, interview

Interview customers who have purchased from you (feedback forms), and customers on the website (live chats, polls, etc). Find out why they chose to buy from you, as well as what factors contributed to their decision. Your sales team is the most important group you should interview.

These people and women know your customers best and are closest to them. They listen to customers and understand their shopping habits. They can tell you, almost without looking, which customers are most popular and what trends they see between these groups.

Interviews are undoubtedly the most valuable source of qualitative data. Although it can be cheap and useful for learning, it does not represent all customers. The feedback you receive will be valuable and personal. It may also give you insight into certain idiosyncrasies of some customers that you might be able to leverage.

Interviews are the best way to determine personas. However, they can also be used later to get feedback and test your positioning.

The most difficult part of creating buyer personas is the research questions.

It can be difficult to create questions and answer them in the way that customers want. MakeMyPersona is a tool created by HubSpot that can help you to identify a buyer persona. Then, you can use it to integrate your marketing strategies.

MakeMyPersona is an interactive web tool that creates buyer personas. It can be used by marketers, brands, small and large businesses, as well as startups. After answering a series of questions about your ideal customers, the tool will generate these personas.

What can you do with this information?

Once you have the trends, data, and anecdotes you will be able to create cross-sections of customers to which you can tailor your messaging and possibly market differently.

It is important to create profiles that include key information about the person, such as their shopping habits, likes, and dislikes, as well as demographic information.

These techniques will allow you to put together robust, reliable personas that will allow you to quickly help your team understand who you are talking to, how you will talk to them, and ultimately how you can set proposition messages against products that are suitable to different groups.

P&G’s Head and Shoulders campaign is a simple example of how they sell their products. P&G sells its products to women based on the quality of the shampoo or the visual benefits it has for your hair.

Men are more likely to be active (using footballers as their models) and have a choice of lifestyle that allows them to look good while doing the activity.

Each demographic has it’s own messaging and tone. The benefits offered to them are completely different. Although this is a simple example of men vs women, it illustrates my point that different marketing strategies are needed for different audiences (or personas). These are 10 additional examples of personas from Alexa to help get you started.

Both qualitative and quantitative data collection orientations have their pros and cons. You should start with qualitative data to understand the market. With this knowledge, you will be able to move on to quantitative research to measure variables that you have discovered during the qualitative research phase.

Download our guide to creating marketing personas that work for you. We’re here to help if you need it.