Audience segments and make your marketing stronger.

It's important to establish buyer personas for your business so you can segment your audience and create stronger marketing campaigns.

What are personas?

Finance Manager Melonie. Landscaper Larry. Caregiver Cassy. These names refer to personas: fictional, generalized representations of real people. By grouping people into persona categories, it's much easier for marketers, product designers, salespeople, and services people to tailor their content, messaging, product development, and services to different groups of people.

You might have heard personas referred to more specifically as "buyer personas" or "marketing personas" by marketers, or even "customer personas" or "user personas" by product designers. Regardless who in your business is using them, it's important to remember that personas aren't just for marketing. They're not one of those one-off exercises your marketing team does, only to promptly forget about them several weeks later. Implement your personas across your entire funnel strategy, and let everyone in the organization know who they are -- from Marketing to Product to Sales to Services.

They help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) better, and make it easier for you to tailor content to the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of different types of buyers.

The strongest buyer personas are based on market research as well as on insights you gather from your actual customer base -- through surveys, interviews, and so on. 

Depending on your business, you could have as few as one or two personas, or as many as 10 or 20. You can use them to inform everything from writing more effective copy to developing better products.

You should also create "negative personas"

Whereas a buyer persona is a representation of an ideal customer, a negative or “exclusionary” persona is a representation of who you don’t want as a customer. These are the people you don’t want to target. The fact is, some leads just aren't a good fit for your business. 
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Here are some reasons you wouldn't want to target them:

• They may not have budget.
• They may be students who are only engaging with your content for research or knowledge.
• They may be too advanced for what you're selling.
• They may become a customer, but they were inordinately expensive customer to acquire.
• They may become a customer, but you never recoup the costs of acquiring them because of a low average sale price, their propensity to churn, or their unlikeliness to purchase again from your company.

To identify and understand these kinds of people, you need to create a negative (exclusionary) persona. It may appear counterproductive to spend time getting to know people who will never be your customers, but it'll save you and your team time and money in the long run, as you will not waste time marketing and selling to these people.   

Personal Details of your persona

Name:

Age:

Gender:

Education:

Relationship:

Work related details:

Income:

Job/Role: Who do they report to: Who reports to them: What is the size of their organisation:

Passion Details:

What they love:

How they spend their free time:

Where they spend their money:

What they talk about most:

What problems do they have:

What do they value:

Where do they gain information from: Which social networks/associations do they belong to:

You can also use this tool from Hubspot, to create a buyer persona online and have it sent to you. They use only some of the questions.