How to Create Detailed Buyer Personas for Your Business [Free Persona Template]

Marketing Margie. Sales Sam.IT Isabel. Accounting Alan.

Do you know who your business's buyer personas are? And if so, how much do you know about them?

Buyer personasare semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers based on data and research. They help you focus your time on qualified prospects, guide product development to suit the needs of your target customers, and align all work across your organization (from marketing to sales to service).

As a result, you'll be able to attract high-value visitors, leads, and customers to your business who you'll be more likely to retain over time.

More specifically, having a deep understanding of your buyer persona(s) is critical to driving content creation, product development, sales follow up, and really任何事物that relates to customer acquisition and retention.

"Okay, so personas are really important to my business. But ... how do I actuallymake一？”

啊...百万美元的问题。好消息是，它们并不bob官网官方网站难创造。这全都与您如何获得市场研究和客户数据有关，然后在您的业务中介绍该信息。

Follow along with this guide anddownload these persona templates简化此过程。在不知不觉中，您将拥有完整的，精心计划的买家角色，向您的整个公司炫耀！bob全站app

Before we dive into the buyer persona-creation process, let's pause to understand the impact of well-developed buyer personas on your business (most specifically, your marketing efforts).

到底是为什么买家角色对你那么重要r business?

Buyer personas help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) better. This makes it easier for you to tailor your content, messaging, product development, and services to meet the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of the members of your target audience.

使用HubSpot角色模板轻松组织您的受众群体并使您的营销更强大

例如，您可能知道您的目标买家是看护人，但是您知道他们的特定需求和兴趣是什么？您的典型背景是什么ideal买家?为了得到一个完整的现代人理解ding of what makes your best customers tick, it's critical to develop detailed personas for your business.

The strongest buyer personas are based on market research as well asinsights您从实际的客户群（通过调查，访谈等）收集。

Depending on your business, you could have as few as one or two personas, or as many as 10 or 20. But if you’re new to personas, start small — you can always develop more personas later if needed.

那“负”买家角色呢？

While a buyer persona is a representation of youridealcustomer, a negative — or "exclusionary” — persona is a representation of who youdon’twant as a customer.

For example, this could include professionals who are too advanced for your product or service, students who are only engaging with your content for research/ knowledge, or potential customers who are just too expensive to acquire (because of a low average sale price, their propensity to churn, or their unlikeliness to purchase again from your company).

如何将买方角色用于营销？

在最基本的层面上，开发角色使您可以创建吸引目标受众的内容和消息传递。它还使您可以定位或personalize your marketingfor different segments of your audience.

For example, instead of sending the same lead nurturing emails to everyone in your database, you can segment by buyer persona and tailor your messaging to what you know about those different personas.

Furthermore, when combined with lifecycle stage (i.e. how far along someone is in your sales cycle), buyer personas also allow you to map out and create highly targeted content. (You can learn more about how to do that bydownloading our Content Mapping Template。)

And if you take the time to also create negative personas, you’ll have the added advantage of being able to segment out the "bad apples” from the rest of your contacts, which can help you achieve a lower cost-per-lead and cost-per-customer — and, therefore, see higher sales productivity.

Different Types of Buyer Personas

在开始以自己的角色工作时，您可能会问自己：“买家角色的不同类型是什么？”从那里开始，适应您的业务很容易 - 对吗？

Well, that's not exactly how it works — there isn't a set list of universally-recognized buyer personas to choose from, nor is there a standard for the number of personas you need. This is because each business (no matter how many competitors they have) is unique — and for that reason, their buyer personas should be unique to them, too.

For these reasons, identifying and creating your different buyer personas can, at times, be slightly challenging. This is why we recommend usingHubSpot's Make My Personagenerator (as well asHubSpot's persona templates) to simplify the process of creating different personas.

通常，公司的买方角色可能具有相同的类别（例如，营销人员，人力资源代表，IT经理等）。但是，您的业务具有不同的角色以及您的业务所需的数量将量身定制为您的目标受众包括谁以及您为客户提供的服务。

现在，您准备好开始创建买家角色了吗？

How to Create Buyer Personas

Buyer personas can be created through research, surveys, and interviews — all with a mix of customers, prospects, and those outside your contacts database who might align with your target audience.

Here are some practical methods for gathering the information you need to develop personas:

• 透过你的contacts databaseto uncover trends about how certain leads or customers find and consume your content.

• Use form fields that capture important persona information when创建在您的网站上使用的表格。For example, if all of your personas vary based on company size, ask each lead for information about company size on your forms.

• Consider your sales team's feedback on the leads they're interacting with most. What generalizations can they make about the different types of customers you serve best?

• Interview customers and prospects to discover what they like about your product or service.

Now, how can you use the above research to create your personas?

Once you've gone through the research process, you'll have a lot of meaty, raw data about your potential and current customers. But what do you do with it? How do you distill all of it so it's easy for everyone to understand all the information you've gathered?

The next step is to use your research to identify patterns and commonalities from the answers to your interview questions, develop at least one primary persona, and share that persona with the rest of the company.

Use our免费，可下载的角色模板to organize the information you've gathered about your persona(s). Then share these slides with the rest of your company so everyone can benefit from the research you've done and develop an in-depth understanding of the person (or people) they're targeting every day at work.

Here's how to work through the steps involved in creating your buyer personas in more detail.

1. Fill in your persona's basic demographic information.

Ask demographic-based questions over the phone, in person, or through online surveys. (Some people are more comfortable disclosing personal information like this.)

It's also helpful to include some descriptive buzzwords and mannerisms of your persona that you may have picked up on during your conversations to make it easier for people on your team to identify certain personas when they're talking to prospects.

Here's an example of how you might complete Section 1 inyour templatefor one of your personas:

2. Share what you've learned about your persona's motivations.

This is where you'll distill the information you learned from asking "why" during those interviews. What keeps your persona up at night? Who do they want to be? Most importantly, tie that all together by telling people how your company can help them.

3.帮助您的销售团队为与角色的对话做准备。

Include some real quotes from your interviews that exemplify what your personas are concerned about, who they are, and what they want. Then create a list of the objections they might raise so your sales team is prepared to address those during their conversations with prospects.

4. Craft messaging for your persona.

告诉人们如何与您的角色谈论您的产品/服务。这包括您应该使用的小小的肉眼，以及更通用的电梯音高，以与您的角色产生共鸣的方式定位解决方案。

This will help you ensure everyone in your company is speaking the same language when they're having conversations with leads and customers.

Finally, make sure you give your persona a name (e.g. Finance Manager Margie, IT Ian, or Landscaper Larry) so everyone internally refers to each persona the same way, allowing for cross-team consistency.

How to Find Interviewees for Researching Buyer Personas

One of the most critical steps to establishing your buyer persona(s) is finding some people to speak with to suss out, well, who your buyer persona is.

That means you'll have to conduct some interviews to get to know what drives your target audience. But how do you find those interviewees? There are a few sources you should tap into:

1. Use your current customers.

Your existing customer base is the perfect place to start with your interviews because they've already purchased your product and engaged with your company. At least some of them are likely to exemplify your target persona(s).

Don't just talk to people who love your product and want to spend an hour gushing about you (as good as that feels). Customers who are unhappy with your product will show other patterns that will help you form a solid understanding of your personas.

For example, you might find that some of yourlesshappy customers have bigger teams and need greater collaboration functionality from your product. Or, you may find they find your product too technical and difficult to use. In both cases, you learn something about your product and what your customers' challenges are.

面试当前客户的另一个好处是，您可能不需要为他们提供激励措施（例如礼品卡）。客户经常喜欢被听到 - 采访他们，使他们有机会告诉您他们的世界，挑战以及他们对您的产品的看法。

Customers also like to have an impact on the products they use. So, as you involve them in interviews like this, you may find they become even more loyal to your company. When you reach out to customers, be clear that your goal is to get their feedback, and that their feedback is highly-valued by your team.

2. Use your prospects.

请务必采访那些未购买您的产品并且对您的品牌也不了解的人。您当前的前景和潜在客户是一个不错的选择，因为您已经拥有他们的联系信息。

Use the data you do have about them (i.e. anything you've collected through lead generation forms or website analytics) to figure out who might fit into your target personas.

3. Use your referrals.

您可能还需要依靠一些推荐来与可能适合您目标角色的人交谈，尤其是当您进入新市场或还没有任何潜在客户或客户时。

Use your network — such as your coworkers, existing customers, social media contacts — to find people you'd like to interview and be introduced to. It may be tough to get a large volume of people this way, but you'll likely get some very high-quality interviews out of it.

If you don't know where to start, try searching on LinkedIn for people who may fit into your target personas and see which results have any connections in common with you. Then,reach out to your common connectionsfor introductions.

4.使用第三方网络。

对于完全从您公司撤离的受访者，您可以从中招募一些第三方网络。bob全站appCraigslist允许您为对任何工作感兴趣的人发布广告和UserTesting.comallows you to run remote user testing (with some follow-up questions).

You'll have less control over sessions run through UserTesting.com, but it's a great resource for quick user testing recruiting.

Now that how to identity interviewees, let's look at some tips for recruiting them.

Tips for Recruiting Interviewees

As you reach out to potential interviewees, here are a few ideas to improve your response rates.

1. Use incentives.

While you may not need them in all scenarios (e.g. customers who already want to talk to you), incentives give people a reason to participate in an interview if they don't have a relationship with you. A simple gift card is an easy option.

2. Be clear that this isn't a sales call.

This is especially important when dealing with non-customers. Be clear that you're doing research and that you just want to learn from them. You are不是getting them to commit to a one-hour sales call; you're getting them to commit to telling you about their lives, jobs, and challenges.

3. Make it easy to say yes.

Take care of everything for your potential interviewee — suggest times but be flexible, allow them to pick a time right off the bat, and send a calendar invitation with a reminder to block off their time.

4.确定您需要面试多少人。

不幸的是，答案取决于。从您创建的每个角色至少进行三到五次访谈开始。如果您已经对自己的角色了解很多，那就足够了。您可能需要在每个类别的受访者（客户，潜在客户，不认识您的公司的人）中进行多次面试。bob全站app

经验法则是，当您开始准确预测受访者会说什么时，可能是时候停止了。通过这些访谈，您自然会开始注意到模式。

Once you start expecting and predicting what your interviewee is going to say, that means you've interviewed enough people to find and internalize these patterns.

5.确定您会问哪些问题。

是时候进行采访了！在正常的小聊天和感谢之后，是时候开始讨论您的问题了。有几类questions you'll want to ask in persona interviewsto create a complete persona profile.

20 Questions to Ask in Persona Interviews

The following questions are organized into eight categories, but, feel free to customize this list and remove or add more questions that may be appropriate for your target customers.

1. Role Questions

• What is your job role? Your title?
• 您的工作如何衡量？
• What does a typical day look like?
• 您的工作需要什么技能？
• 您在工作中使用哪些知识和工具？
• Who do you report to? Who reports to you?

2. Company Questions

• 您的公司在哪个行业或行业中工作？bob全站app

• What is the size of your company (revenue, employees)?

3. Goal Questions

• What are you responsible for?
• What does it mean to be successful in your role?

4. Challenge Question

• What are your biggest challenges?

5. Watering Hole Questions

• How do you learn about new information for your job?
• What publications or blogs do you read?
• 您参与哪些协会和社交网络？

6. Personal Background Questions

• 描述您的个人人口统计学（如果可能的话，询问他们的年龄，是否已婚以及是否有孩子）。
• Describe your educational background. What level of education did you complete, which schools did you attend, and what did you study?
• 描述您的职业道路。您是如何最终到达今天的位置的？

7. Shopping Preference Questions

• How do you prefer to interact with vendors (e.g. email, phone, in person)?
• Do you use the internet to research vendors or products? If yes, how do you search for information?
• 描述最近的购买。您为什么考虑购买，评估过程是什么，以及如何决定购买该产品或服务？

8. The "Why?" Question

This is the number one tip for a successful persona interview.

The follow-up question to pretty much every question in the above list should be "why?" Through these interviews, you're trying to understand your customers' (or potential customers') goals, behaviors, and motivators. But keep in mind that people aren't always great at reflecting on their behaviors to tell you what drives them at their core.

You don't care that they measure the number of visits to their website, for example. What you care about is that they measure these visits as a way to show their higher-ups that they're doing a good job.

Start with a simple question — for instance, "What is your biggest challenge?" Then spend a good amount of time diving deeper into that one question to learn more about that person. You learn more by asking, "why?" than more superficial questions.

Create Your Buyer Personas

Create your buyer personas to understand your target customers on a deeper level and ensure everyone on your team knows how to best target, support, and work with your customers. This will help you improve reach, boost conversions, and increase loyalty.

如果您是HubSpot客户，请将您的角色添加到您的角色HubSpot Marketing Platformbyfollowing this step-by-step setup guide。

编者按:这篇文章最初发表in May 2015 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.