In our previous article about Customer Research, we explained what type of information you need to get from your current or potential customers in order to gain insights. In this article, we will go through how to create personas based on your customer research and analysis.
Persona Creation
A persona (or a buyer persona) is a hypothetical and generalized representation of your ideal customers. Creating personas for each product/service or solution is essential for your future marketing activities or anything else that relates to customer acquisition and retention.
Every persona’s pain points, goals, therefore, their reason for buying your product/service will differ, so all of your marketing activities and future communications have to be done accordingly. For instance, a sales representative might be interested in a different product feature of a CRM tool than an IT manager who also uses the same product.
In this context, defining your buyer persona(s) will enable you to easily tailor your funnels, landings, ads, content marketing, and email marketing activities around their needs. You will also be able to shift your marketing strategy and activities based on the persona that gives you the most successful results. We’ll be covering this in our upcoming guides.
For more established brands, in addition to customer interviews and surveys, you can also identify some behavioural patterns about your customers from your current database (like how certain leads or customers find and consume your content) or use your current website to form fields/landing pages to capture the information you need. You can also ask for your sales team’s feedback on the leads they’re interacting with the most.
We will now walk you through on how to create personas easily through our online learning platform: the Growth Marketing Hub (GMH). In the end, you will be able to compile all your raw data into a clear cut persona information display, through the GMH.
Before you start, please make sure you have completed your Internal Checkup, Competitor Research and Analysis, and Customer Research on the Growth Marketing Hub. For those who don’t have an established brand, or if you haven’t completed the previous steps, you can use the Growth Marketing Hub to simply exercise each module and process just for practice.
As the next step after your customer research, you now need to define commonalities and patterns from your interview questions/survey and create at least one primary persona.
We start with the “Persona Creation” menu at the Growth Marketing Hub panel. You can select “Start a New Persona Creation” box from the menu to create a new persona.
The questions will vary whether your company caters to businesses or individuals, so you need to select your persona type at first.
If you don’t have an established brand and personas, you can use the Growth Marketing Hub to simply exercise each module and process.
Persona Name: It is important to humanize your persona. Even if you don’t have any previous data from your existing or potential customers, create a real name and an avatar in order to see this persona as a real person.
You can name your personas with their title, industry, or any other attribution to make it easier to remember- something like CTO Jack or Finance Julia.
Click “NEXT STEP” to proceed
How is his/her job measured?: Performance at work can be measured in various ways depending on the role. For instance, if your customer is in HR, his/her job can be measured by team productivity, employee engagement scores, project fulfilment, and Glassdoor score etc. The other most common examples would be sales volume, generated leads, revenue growth rates, net profits, net promoter score (NPS), return on investment (ROI), and unit KPIs.
Click “NEXT STEP” to proceed
Your persona’s objectives and challenges play a big part in your future marketing activities. They will give you the answer to the question: why does this persona need my product/solution/services? So, make sure you elaborate with as much information as possible to better determine how your business can meet their needs.
Click “SUBMIT” You have completed your first B2B Persona Creation.
Not finished yet? You can continue to create new buyer personas by clicking "Start a New Buyer Persona Creation". You can also check your completed buyer personas from the same menu.
How many buyer personas should you create?
Eliminating unique personas from your customer research results can be challenging. Having very few personas can lower the value of your offer because it will be generic. At the same time, having too many personas can distract you from focusing on the primary ones. To narrow it down, you should always prioritize the ones you really want to sell to at first, rather than people who can buy your product.
You can determine the number of unique buyer personas based on:
Persona Name: It is important to humanize your persona. Even if you don’t have any previous data from your existing or potential customers, create a real name and an avatar in order to see this persona as a real person.
You can gather this information from: Questions About Purchasing Demographics (B2C) on the Customer Research guide.
Click “NEXT STEP” to proceed
You can gather this information from: Questions About Purchasing Preferences (B2C) in the Customer Research guide.
Click “NEXT STEP” to proceed.
Click “NEXT STEP” to proceed.
You can gather this information from: Questions About Purchasing Preferences (B2C) on the Customer Research guide.
Click “SUBMIT”. You have completed your first B2B Persona Creation.
Not finished yet? You can continue to create new buyer personas by clicking "Start a New Persona Creation". You can also check your completed buyer personas from the same menu.
How many personas should you create?
Eliminating unique personas from your customer research results can be challenging. Having very few personas can lower the value of your offer because it will be generic. At the same time, having too many personas can distract you from focusing on the primary ones. So, to narrow it down, you should always prioritize the ones you really want to sell to at first, rather than people who can buy your product.
You can determine the number of unique buyer personas based on:
You can see the completed Buyer Personas for each persona you created on this screen.
Click on a persona box to see the whole details of that particular persona.
