Well, yes, yes you do! Not all personas are equal, but you absolutely need buyer personas in order to properly understand your target audience and to be able to reach them effectively.
In many cases, we see buyer personas with detailed information, including things like age, education and how many kids they have. But are the details absolutely necessary?
What should my buyer personas include?
As mentioned before, not all buyer personas are equal – and what I mean by that is – the details you include in your buyer personas should reflect the way your company deals with clients. Not all the details that would be beneficial to one company are useful for another.
For example, if you are selling a product, like a beverage that promotes a certain kind of lifestyle, then details about the age range and family situations will likely be more relevant. Whereas if you are providing a service like software development, those same details might not be as important – but other details like salary ranges and education will be significant.
You need buyer personas because they will inform your marketing and sales decisions, but you should also strongly consider what details are most important for your business. Including irrelevant details could bog you down or limit your reach if they become a focus or make your target too narrow.
Details you can include in buyer personas
Here you’ll find some of the details that can be included in buyer personas but you’re not limited to these alone.
Addressing pain points is vital
One thing that every buyer persona must include is the pain points for each persona. These pain points are the challenges faced by your personas, for which you have a solution. This helps you to target your audience based on their actual needs, rather than some broad assumption about what will attract them.
The paint points can come from past experiences with previous clients, from user research, from any data you’ve collected on customers or from your gut instincts. It’s usually best to draw from a couple of these areas, rather than just going with your gut, though.
You also need buyer personas to include the solutions your company offers. Think about the pain points for each persona and what your business does to solve those problems. Is your persona short on time? Perhaps your automated process helps make their daily work more efficient. Is your persona not particularly trusting? Think about the ways that you can build trust, and be more transparent.
I need buyer personas, but how many?
This will vary from company to company, and business to business, but on average we usually recommend 3 buyer personas. When you create too many personas then it becomes very difficult to target any one of them, and the content you create will be too broad. That, or it will become even more challenging to create enough content to target each persona.
You need buyer personas to really help you focus on your target market. Narrowing your focus helps to ensure that you are in fact targeting the right people for your product or service and do it effectively – in the right places, in the right way, using the right language. Don’t spread yourself too thin because you could just be throwing content out there that doesn’t grab anyone’s attention at all.
This is not to say that each piece of content will only target a single persona. In some cases we’ll find that pain points in buyer personas can overlap, so we can create 1 piece of content that targets 2 personas at the same time.
Start building your buyer personas
The best place to start is to start collecting any company documentation you have, like your Unique Selling Propositions (USPs), Business Model Canvas, any notes from discussions you’ve had about target markets and any information you can collect on past clients (assuming you’ve already had some).
You can also look to your competitors to get a sense of who they are targeting. You could learn that there are some important differences in their personas versus yours – or you might find that they are missing a key niche market that you could target.
All of this documentation can help to inform your buyer persona details.
Buyer personas are not a one-and-done
Like most business documents, buyer personas are also living documents. As the market changes, your business grows or other factors develop over time, so will your personas.
We recommend that every 6 months to 1 year, depending on your situation, you revisit your personas to see if there are any new insights that might change some of the details in each persona.
Of course, you might not see any changes at all, but generally speaking, there are usually a few details that you’ll find need updating based on the information you’ve collected and observations you’ve made over time.
One size doesn’t fit all
It’s so important that your buyer personas are tailored specifically to your company. Even your direct competitors will have some differences in their personas and it’s important to determine exactly what details you really need to include, to ensure that you can effectively and impactfully reach your target market.
Buyer personas will help to inform your marketing and sales efforts, but also the direction in which your company continues to move or grow. You need buyer personas, and not having them clearly outlined could mean that you’re missing out on opportunities.