Buyer personas are a simple, powerful way for sales, marketing, and design & development teams to better understand, engage and impact their customers/users. They can help you set priorities, allocate resources, uncover gaps and put the spotlight on new opportunities, but more important than that is the way they get everyone on the same page, moving in the same direction, trying to reach the same destination.
Even though different teams use different tools and tactics, personas help to ensure that all those individual efforts are complimentary, not competing.
Now that you understand why personas are important and how you use a segmentation framework, the last step is putting it all together.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
Having identified key demographic and psychographic descriptors for each group, the last thing to do is condense and consolidate this information to create individual buyer personas.
This is usually a pretty straightforward process: keep what’s most unique, meaningful and/or representative, and get rid of what’s not.
If you have a few descriptors that are similar, you’ll want to combine them; if you end up with more than one unique set of descriptors for any given group, you’ll want to split them into two different personas.
When you’re done you should have individual sets of descriptors that reflect your framework and represent the composite characteristics of your key customer groups.
While you could just give your team a list of the descriptive characteristics associated with each of your buyer personas, a few simple additions can make this information much more accessible.
Start by giving each buyer persona a unique name that relates back to your organizing framework — e.g. “4-Wheel Fred The Off-road Influencer,” “Tia The Teacher,” “The Independent Fashion Designer,” etc.
Then, include a brief bio or personality summary that aligns with your underlying descriptors and any demographics. And finally, add an image or illustration that “puts a face”on your persona.
If you use an online persona builder (or are willing to do the work yourself), you can make your personas even more engaging and immersive by including additional details, like brands and lifestyle choices, hobbies & interests, specific personality traits and/or tendencies that would commonly be associated with the type of person you’re describing, social media habits, interaction styles, engagement needs, narrative preferences, etc.
These details give you the emotional, intellectual and/or experiential connections you can use to emphasize and understand your prospects, yielding those "A-ha!" moments where you know just want you need to do to attract, engage and convert them.
Once you’ve packaged up your buyer personas, the last thing to do is share them with sales, marketing, design & development, customer success, and anyone else on your team who needs to better understand who you’re trying to engage and how best to engage them.
For more, see How To Create A Buyer Personas, Pt. 1: What Is A Buyer Persona And Why Should You Use Them? and How To Create A Buyer Personas, Pt. Pt. 2: Getting Started With Research & Analysis
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