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:

 Look through your contacts database to uncover trends about how certain

leads or customers find and consume your content.
 Use form fields that capture important persona information when creating
forms to use on your website. 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 free, downloadable persona template 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.