The Science of Great Buyer Personas [INFOGRAPHIC]

Defining your target audience is key to increasing site traffic, getting more qualified leads from your marketing efforts, and in turn, closing more deals.

But, how do you do this? Create buyer personas, people.

The technical definition of a buyer persona (if you’re not familiar with them) is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and what you already know about your existing customers.

But, simply put, the buyer personas you create should be the target customers for your organization, the ones whose problems you are trying to solve with your service or solution.

It’s not a vague, big audience like in traditional marketing. It’s a focused, realistic identity that you can pick out in a crowd.

Once you understand this and get to know a little about your person, you are able to create a buying experience that they are more likely to benefit from and engage with.

So, how do you make sure your personas are as accurate as possible? By using science and real data. Gathering the right data will give you valuable insight based on truth, not assumption.

By examining user demographic information like age, gender, and location, as well as ethnographic data like keyword research and social media activity, you can start to identify trends to distinguish parts of your audience.

The more data you are able to gather, analyze and segment, the more valuable your persona profile will be.

In the infographic below by SingleGrain, you will find actionable tips that will help you research and build out buyer personas for your organization (as well as tons of awesome stats that back up why this process is so important).

Here are just a few of the key points included:

• Have customer-facing team members compile assumptions about user needs, paint points, and attributes.

• Use forum searches, keyword research, and social activity to observe target customers.

• Collect demographic information including age, gender, ethnicity, income, and location through multiple-choice surveys.

• When constructing persona profiles, make sure to give them a name and clearly define the call-to-action based on their unmet need.

Check out the full infographic below. You can also read the original post here for a more detailed dive into each section. 

Ready to get started building your buyer personas? Click here to download our free Buyer Persona Kit .