What Is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of one of your ideal clients based on research and educated speculation.

Buyer personas are extremely important for creating content that:

• Attracts the right strangers
• Turns strangers into visitors to your website
• Converts visitors into leads
• Accelerates leads into sales opportunities
• Closes sales opportunities to clients

Buyer personas help your business obtain more than just any clients or revenue sources, but the exact kind of clients and revenue sources you want.

Personas help to create educational thought-leadership content that appeals to ideal buyers. Personas can help your content grab ideal visitors through their virtual shirt collars while they are skimming search engine results or social media online.

When companies produce content that falls flat, does not resonate, or does not attract the right people, it usually means they screwed up their buyer personas or were lazy and did not do buyer persona research at all.

Buyer personas are extremely important for developing helpful educational content that attracts the ideal

• Clients
• Business partners
• Job candidates
• Channel partners
  

Adding Buyer Personas to Your Sales Strategies

Personas are not just necessary for traffic generation, lead generation, and sales acceleration. Buyer personas are also extremely important for your sales team. When you hand personas to your sales team, they should be prioritized as follows:

• Primary buyer persona
• Secondary buyer persona
• Negative buyer personas (the opposite of a buyer persona)

These persona documents will help your sales team invest their resources in the right places. Buyer personas are the perfect solution if you have thought about your sales team, like, “Gosh, they are really spinning their wheels and chasing the wrong kinds of clients. I wish there were a way to get everything on the same page across the entire company to get everyone aligned.”

Sub-personas are important to establish. For example, maybe you are chasing the CEO of a company, but getting the head of operations is a good consolation prize and a good influencer.

Adding Buyer Personas to Your Product Strategies

Often, with small companies, a Chief Technology Officer, Head Engineer, or Co-Founder will take on the role of Head of Product. If your company is large enough to have the luxury of having employees in product roles, they will love the idea of buyer personas. For product roles, personas are an extension of the same type of research they develop to ensure:

• They make the right products and services
• Their products are produced for the right kinds of people
• They know the exact market they want to attract,
• They know the exact price points that they want to sell at

The Bottom Line

Buyer personas are important to various departments, such as marketing, sales, and product development. Personas are important for getting everyone on the same page and focused on the right kinds of outcomes at the bottom of the funnel.

Personas should be prioritized. Your business should focus its efforts on the most profitable, primary buyer personas first. Secondary personas—where there is a gray area, and buyers are kind of profitable and worth it but should not be worth a lot of resources—should be identified as well.

Negative buyer personas are the kinds of people you never want to sell to because they are a trainwreck as clients, become a really bad fit over time, and are eventually unprofitable. Developing negative personas will help your teams avoid wasting time and resources. Develop sub-personas as well.

Personas should influence everything that you do going forward with your digital assets. You should not write blogs, build website pages, do keyword research, SEO, Google Adwords, social media, or lead generation content until you nail your buyer personas.

 
If you move forward with any of the above before developing your buyer personas, you are skating on thin ice. Make sure your buyer personas are a key part of everything you do if your business is focused on scalable, predictable revenue generation.

 Also, see

• Buyer Personas (Glossary Definition)
• Buyer Personas and Keyword Research Strategy
• Ignoring Buyer Personas is Medieval (Moneyball Marketing)

Has your company developed buyer personas? Let us know in the comments below.
              
To learn more about developing and implementing buyer personas into business strategies,  enroll now in our free 7-day eCourse: Go-to-Market Strategy 101 for B2B SaaS Startups and Scaleups.