Wouldn’t it be great if you had a profile of who your exact customer was?  Imagine all of the things you could do with that information.  You could do research specifically on that ideal customer.  You could design your marketing creatives and programs around exactly what that ideal customer likes and is receptive to.  You could get rid of the fluff and only target those leads who fit that ideal customer profile.  No more wasting time having to call, email or meet everyone…you only seek to interact with those who meet that profile.  Sounds great huh?  Sounds like something impossible or that you have to pay tons of money to a consultant to develop a lengthy report right?  Wrong.

This “ideal customer profile”, as I refer to it, is actually called a “buyer persona”.  A buyer persona is a detailed profile of an example buyer that represents your audience – an archetype of the ideal customer.  The word “buyer” actually represents whoever your target customer is.  As Adele Revella explains:

The goal for buyer personas is to make them so real and persuasive that the company will be willing to take direction from them…Their [the buyer persona] purpose is to tell a story to internal audiences about how a particular type of buyer views the decision to buy the company’s product, service or idea.  The story must be real, even though the persona is not.  Persona developers need to continously interact with buyers to keep the story real, reiterating the buyers’ perspective whenever an internal decision loses its focus.

Want to see what a buyer persona looks like?

David Meerman Scott highlights Kadient, a SaaS application provider, who have successfully implemented buyer personas.  To check out a couple of the buyer personas they have developed, check out David’s post.

How can you develop your own buyer persona(s)?

While there are a bunch of ways to develop your buyer personas, here are just 3 that I think will keep you pretty busy for a little while and will help you to start to gain a better detailed picture of your ideal customer.

1. Analyze you current customer data – If you collect any demographic or user data, analyze to see what your average customer looks like.  Of course, the more information you collect during the customer acquisition phase of your sales cycle, the easier this will be to develop a complete picture.

2. Listen to your team – Listen to what your internal sales and marketing team tell you about interactions they have with people about your company’s products or services.  Are consistently noticing that they’re talking to a middle-aged woman with kids yelling in the background and who always seems to be in a rush?  That’s important to note.  You have a lot less time to get your message across with that person then you might with others.  Maybe your marketing team runs into the same type of people at every conference you set up a booth at.  Again, important to note, analyze and target your messaging towards.

3. Ask for feedback – Ask your customers for feedback on what they would like to see.  Did they really like that last website refresh because it made their life easier to find some information because of how busy they are in meetings all day?  That’s important to know.  Then you need to make your messaging snackable.  Marketing delivered to that persona in any other manner will crash and burn because they’re too busy to read it and just delete it or never get around to it.

Have you developed buyer personas at your company?  If so, have they been successful?  If you’re not using buyer personas at your company, what are you waiting for?

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Photo by: emery.josh