How to Create Buyer Personas for Your Growing Technology Company?

“Persona” is basically the aspect of someone’s character that is perceived by others. In the marketing world, a buyer persona is a clear, detailed representation of the right customers for your business based on market research and accurate customer data.

What are Buyer Personas?

Buyer personas provide powerful insights for your company. A well-structured buyer persona can help you figure out where you should be investing your time and it can also guide you in product development. As a result of buyer personas, you will be able to acquire valuable leads who will then become loyal customers for your business.

Having a clear understanding of market segmentation is absolutely crucial for product development, content creation, sales, and pretty much everything that aligns with customer acquisition and customer retention.

According to a case study by MarketingSherpa, buyer personas helped them:

1. Increase the length of page visits by 900%
2. Increase marketing-generated revenue by 171%
3. Increase email open rates by 111%
4. Increase the number of pages visited by 100%

Knowing who your customers are and what they want, will ultimately help you personalize your marketing efforts for different segments of your audience.

When creating buyer personas, you must consider:

1. Customer demographics
2. The behavior patterns of your customers
3. What motivates your customers to buy
4. Buyer’s goals and challenges

The more detailed your buyer’s personas are the better.

When used properly, a well-constructed buyer persona research can help you clearly figure out who you are constructing your marketing content for and how to run different marketing campaigns.

Most businesses typically create 3 to 5 buyer personas. Having around 3-4 personas usually can contribute to around 90% of any company’s sales.

Analyzing the motivating factors and pain points of your business can help you come up with a detailed buyer’s persona of your own — one that can help you drive sales.

Download the Buyer Persona Template ➜

Types of Buyer Personas (and How to Sell to Them)

1. The One Who Seeks Value
2. The One Who Investigates
3. The One Who Promotes Unconditionally
4. The One Who Loves Social Media
5. The One Who Keeps On Buying
6. The One Who Shops On The Go
7. The One Who Gifts Selflessly

As a business, you need to understand your potential customers and come up with enticing content and tactics to influence them.

By customizing your products to precisely align with your buyer personas, you will be able to drive more sales, maximize your reach, and establish a prolonged customer relationship.

Here are 7 major types of buyer personas that you can use to segment your target customers:

1- The One Who Seeks Value

Value seekers are interested in products that offer the most value to money. These types of buyers hope to find products that have discounted prices or offer deals.

To sell your products or services to value seekers, offer an irresistible value proposition that’s just too hard to pass by. You must make sure to tell your customers about the benefits of your products and why it’s worth getting. Offering, coupons, discounted deals, and limited-time offers will motivate value seekers to make a purchase.

2- The One Who Investigates

Investigators are keen on finding what benefit a product has to offer. Such buyers take a lot of time researching and comparing products. They want to make sure what they’re purchasing is the best value to money option out there.

To sell your products to investigators, you’ll have to tell your customers how your products add value to their lives. You’ll also need to answer their questions regarding your products and justify how your brand stands on its promises.

To help investigators make up their minds, adding product reviews and testimonials can help. Authentic customer reviews on social channels can build trust among your potential customers and motivate them to buy your products.

3- The One Who Promotes Unconditionally

Brand promoters are loyal advocates of your brand. Such buyers are familiar with the products you sell and know your brand values. These types of buyers are your repeated customers and serve as brand ambassadors.

To sell your products to brand promoters, you’ll need to value and acknowledge them. Offering them incentives like loyalty points can strengthen your brand loyalty and customer trust. You’ll also need to keep your brand advocates engaged with what your business is up to.

Creating an engaging user experience will ensure your loyal customers keep returning to your brand.

4- The One Who Loves Social Media

Next, we have social media influencers. These types of buyers love to share what they see on social media. Such buyers share whatever products they find interesting with their friends and family.

When targeting social media influencers, make sure to show them personalized product recommendations. Products they might find interesting enough to share on social media. Speaking of sharing products on social media, you must make sure to make the social sharing process easy for your customers.

5- The One Who Keeps On Buying

Recurring customers are highly valuable for any business. These types of buyers love your product and regularly visit your website to buy from you.

To retain recurring customers, you should consider offering them a value proposition. Giving such buyers perks like free shipping can make your existing customers happy.

You can also deploy an email subscription service to keep your customers updated with new product releases and seasonal promotions.

If you can make your existing customers feel exclusive and valued, they will stick with your brand for years without switching.

6- The One Who Shops On The Go

On-the-go buyers shop for products from their mobile devices. To sell your products to mobile shoppers, you must provide a seamless and responsive mobile shopping experience. Your product store should load instantly and display proper images. You should make the add-to-cart and checkout process also simple and hassle-free.

7- The One Who Gifts Selflessly

The last type of customer that you should consider in your buyer personas are gifters. Gifters are people who purchase products for their loved ones.

To sell your products to gifters, you’d want to present your products as the best gift option your customer can find anywhere. You’ll need to highlight the value of your products and they can make their loved ones feel special.

To add even more value, try incorporating gifting guides, fast shipping, special deals, and a free gift-wrapping option.

Starting Out With Buyer Personas

No one says it’s easy to set this up. It is important to ask the right questions in your research so that in the end you really benefit from your buyer personas. The most important thing is to keep in mind why you are creating these buyer personas.

You must ultimately be able to respond to this in your marketing strategy and content creation and sales must also gain a better understanding of what kind of customers they are dealing with on the basis of these buyer personas.

The problem is often that you cannot put the same label on all customers. Everyone is unique and no two people are exactly the same, so how do you create general profiles? Sometimes you feel that you can create up to thirty buyer personas for all your different customers.

However, this does not seem very realistic, because you have to develop thirty different strategies for your content. That only makes your life as a marketer more difficult instead of easier. So start slowly with a few buyer personas, for example about three.

Also, don’t make the mistake of adopting standard buyer personas. You always have standard profiles for a certain industry, but this is not specifically aimed at your company. What works in the United States does not necessarily work here. The people in the UAE are different and need their own approach. If you are also active in multiple countries, this also means separate buyer personas for the different countries.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s talk about how you can actually create a buyer’s persona of your own.

How to Create a Buyer Persona?

1. Research about your buyer personas
2. Segmenting your buyer personas
3. Give a name and a fictional backstory to your persona
4. Drill down on your customer’s roles, challenges, and goals
5. Put your buyer personas to test and create marketing strategies around them

Creating an ideal tech buyer persona is not as difficult as you might think. In fact, it is pretty straightforward. It’s all about figuring out who is interested in your product and then converting them into an archetype.

Creating sizable buyer personas takes a lot of time and hard work. However, breaking the process of creating an in-depth buyer’s persona into small chunks can help you market and sell your products effectively over time.

Remember, you can always add more data to your buyer personas as you see fit.

With that said, here are 5 steps that can help you create detailed buyer personas:

• #1: Research about your buyer personas
• #2: Segment the buyer personas you created
• #3: Give a name and a fictional backstory to your persona
• #4: Drill down on your customer’s roles, challenges, and goals
• #5: Put your buyer personas to test and create marketing strategies around them

#1: Research about your buyer personas

Before you construct your buyer personas, you’d need to do a bit of research. Sure, you may be thinking that you already know a lot about your customers. However, it is essential to take some time out and research not just about your existing customers, but also about future prospects – prospects who you’d like to convert into customers in the future.

Who are the people who are buying your product?

Always begin by researching your existing customers. This will save you a heck of a lot of time. Trust us.

The following questions will help you get started with an in-depth buyer’s persona for your technology company:

• Who connected your business?
• Was he/she the only decision-maker of the company?
• What is their job like?
  • What is his/her job description?
  • Is he/she your company’s main point of contact?
  • Are they involved in managing processes or workforce?
  • Do they make the final call or do they have to report to their boss?
• What does their home life look like?
  • How old is he/she?
  • Is he/she married?
  • Do they have kids?
  • What are their hobbies?

Asking these questions should be enough to kick-start your buyer personas. However, we suggest going more in-depth.

Talk directly to your clients

To further drill down, it is a good approach to talk directly to your existing customers. You’d want to get as much information out of them as possible. One way to do this is by sending out surveys or questionnaires.

With that said, not many customers will fill out surveys. To tackle that issue, offer some sort of incentive. For example, offer a small discount on their next purchase. This will surely get your surveys and questionnaires filled up from your ideal customers.

Talk to your employees who deal with customers

Talk to your own employees who deal with your customers. This will give you proper knowledge about the people your company is working with. It is all about understanding your customers.

Who would you like to become your future customers?

After you think you’ve gathered enough information about your existing customers, you’re ready to move on to the next step, which is gathering information about future customers. The customers who you’d like to purchase your products in the future.

• Think about those prospects who are giving a tough time to your marketing team.
• Market segments where your competitors are doing better than you.

When thinking about your future customers, it’s a smart approach to analyze your competitors. Get into the nitty-gritty to see what edge your competitors have over you.

In what areas would you like to see your tech business grow?

To further drill down and figure out how you can acquire new customers for your business, you need to think about areas where you want your company to excel.

For example, even if you are currently dealing with small-scale technology clients, you should be doing research on bigger clients with whom you’d like your company to do business in the future.

Do as much research on such clients as you can. Figure out their pain points, their interests, and the challenges that your business can solve.

Pay attention to your analytics data

The best way to get accurate data for your buyer personas is through analytics. You wouldn’t have to rely on hunches. Getting analytics data from your pay-per-click ads and your website can help you figure out who your ideal customer base is.

Figure out which pages on your website are driving the most traffic. Pay close attention to the demographics of the visitors interacting with ads.

Decipher who is buying your products with accurate data obtained through analytics to create in-depth buyer personas.

#2: Segmenting your buyer personas

Now we move on to actually taking our researched data and putting them into separate neatly labeled file cabinets — segmenting our buyer personas.

Segmentation is relatively less time-consuming than research. It basically involves sifting through data and figuring out where it belongs.

Anyway, here’s what you need to do to segment your buyer personas:

Organize all the Information you gathered

When organizing all of the information you collected, begin by sorting out things that are common. For example, similar challenges and goals of your customers. You’ll need to sort out commonalities and group them into separate individual buyer personas. Figuring out what your

prospects or clients hope to get from your company can help you identify your ideal potential clients.

Figure out how many buyer personas you’ll create

Once you’ve sorted out all the information into different segments, you need to decide how many buyer personas you’ll create. Generally, businesses create around 3-5 buyer personas.

For a tech company, which has unimaginable opportunities to grow, it can be extremely enticing to try and take up every opportunity that comes your way. However, we’d suggest not to cover everyone in your buyer personas all at once.

The best strategy to follow when starting off with buyer personas is to just target the market segment that is most likely to purchase your product.

Once you’re comfortable enough with your buyer personas, you can always come back and change things up. You can add more data about your future prospects to your buyer personas.

Figure out how you’re going to segment your buyer personas

The way you segment buyer personas all depends on you and your company. There are no guidelines to follow. But just in case you don’t know where to start, here are two easy methods that can help you segment your buyer personas:

Segmentation by job titles

No matter what businesses you deal with, you’ll notice that their sales processes remain the same. In the tech industry, you’ll deal with different types of clients from different industries, however, they’ll have employees with similar job roles.

For example, a pharmaceutical business will have a web engineer and so will an eCommerce business. So, you can segment your buyer personas to align with the job titles of clients you deal with. Their pain points and goals will be the same.

You can create buyer personas of all the different clients you deal with based on their job roles. Then, you can develop your marketing strategy for each industry.

Segmentation by Industry

Tech companies work with a variety of industries. If you sell your products to clients in different industries, you should create one buyer persona for each industry you deal with.

Make sure that the clients in each industry have different pain points and goals. Otherwise, you’ll end up creating redundant buyer personas.

For example, the oil and gas industry will have different goals and the cosmetic industry has different goals. In such a case, creating two buyer personas will prove fruitful.

#3: Give a name and a fictional backstory to your persona

With all the research and segmentation done, it’s not time to actually write your buyer personas. Again, there is no set of guidelines to follow when creating buyer personas.

You’ll need to use all of the collected and segmented information from steps 2 and 3 to write your buyer personas. After that, you can prioritize the most important segments as per your business.

Here’s how to start writing a buyer’s persona:

Name your buyer persona

To begin, give your buyer persona a name to make your marketing efforts more personal. The name could be anything. It all depends on you. Once you’ve given your buyer persona a name, start jotting down the information you gathered in your research.

• Who is your persona?
• How old is he/she?
• What is their job title?
• Where does he/she live?
• What are their hobbies?
• What are his/her career goals?

Answering these questions using the information you gathered earlier will help you identify the goals and motivations of your buyer personas. The better you understand what your customers want, the better you’ll be able to cater to their needs in the future.

Create an in-depth profile of your personas

Buyer personas are basically fictional stories compiled using actual data. When writing down a buyer persona, write everything you know about the buyer.

The more information you add to your buyer personas, the better your marketing team will be able to create marketing strategies around it.

We encourage you to go in-depth and be creative with your buyer personas.

#4: Drill down on your customer’s roles, challenges, and goals

Tired from all the writing you just did? Take a break….

Now that you feel accomplished, it’s time to put your buyer personas under the microscope and take the most actionable parts out of them for your marketing teams to start working on them.

The information you’ll now take out will fall into one of three categories:

• Roles
• Goals
• Challenges

Roles

When taking information out for the “roles” category, look for bits of information related to their job titles and job descriptions. Take out any or all relevant information related to their job titles and their job roles.

You can also take out information about the activities they do outside of work.

For example:

• Do they contribute to society?
• Are they parents?
• Do they have any hobbies or interests?

All this relevant information will give you an accurate idea of what your personas are like. Knowing what someone does and what roles they have in their actual life will help your marketing team create customized content that speaks to them on a personal level.

Goals

Understanding the goals of your buyer personas is crucial to offering them personalized service.

Different people have different goals. Some may want to increase the sales of their business. Others may want to better position themselves in a company by taking radical decisions.

When your marketing team understands the goals of a person and what they hope to achieve, they’ll be able to construct marketing strategies in a way that relates to a particular persona on a personalized level.

For this category, take out all the goals you jotted down when writing your buyer personas and organize everything in the “goals” category.

Challenges

Lastly, we have the “challenges” category. This category is the most important part of a buyer persona. In this section, you’ll highlight the pain points of each of your buyer persona.

When you’re able to understand the challenges of your buyer persona, you’ll know exactly how to solve them.

Challenges could be:

• Is your persona afraid of making sizable investments?
• Is your persona not getting enough time to consider how they can improve their business?
• What is preventing your persona from reaching their goals?
• What parts of your persona’s job are difficult?
• Is your persona facing challenges presenting ideas to their supervisors?

Again, go back to the buyer persona you wrote earlier and take out all the challenges your buyer personas are facing. The more challenges you can pinpoint in the challenges category, the more opportunities you’ll get to solve. The more problems you solve, the more clients will want to do business with you.

#5: Put your buyer personas to test and create marketing strategies around them

We’re almost at the end. Are you still with us?

Okay, so you’ve built your in-depth buyer personas. You spent a lot of time and effort figuring out the pain points and the goals, roles, and challenges of each persona. Now you need to develop marketing strategies for potential customers who you know are the perfect fit for your business.

To put your plan into action, you need to sit down with your marketing department and:

• Curate customized content that resonates with the pain points of your buyer personas.
• Develop ad campaigns on platforms that your personas use the most.
• Describe each persona to your marketing team.
• Optimize your landing pages to communicate a clear message to your buyer personas.
• Reuse existing marketing content and tweak it in a way that speaks to your personas

Buyer personas help give you inside knowledge into the ways your most qualified prospects function. From their favorite social media platforms to the way they talk to their career goals, you know a lot about these personas, and you can use that information to your benefit, and to theirs.

And this is it. This is how you can create buyer personas for your technology company.

Buyer personas help you gain insightful knowledge about the best prospects, leads, and customers for your business.

It’s all about knowing your customers, their problems, and how you can solve them. When you create content that resonates with your personas, you’re going to see massive growth in your sales.

Buyer Persona Template

By now, you must have an idea of why establishing sound buyer personas is crucial for any business. You can segment your audience to develop customized marketing campaigns for each persona.

Remember, buyer personas can be different for each segment. Think of segments as small sections of your target market having common characteristics.

Segments include information about:

• Demographic
• Psychographic
• Behavioral
• Geographic

As we’ve discussed earlier, researching and developing buyer personas take a lot of time and effort. And without a clear understanding, it is not easy to get started.

If you don’t have enough time on your hand to create your own buyer personas from scratch, you can use our free buyer persona template. With our free template, you’ll be able to speed up your research, bringing you one step closer to creating your own buyer personas.

Give it a try and impress your boss with well-organized and in-depth buyer personas that can help your business grow.

Buyer Persona Examples

Now that you know everything about creating your own buyer personas, we can now look at some examples of buyer personas developed by other companies.

By analyzing what works for other businesses, you can decide what might be right for your buyer personas. You can take inspiration from the example we’ll share with you and add whatever information is relevant for your business to build your own buyer persona.

Take a look at the following marketing persona templates for B2C and B2B companies:

B2C Buyer Persona Examples

In a B2C or business-to-customer buyer persona, you’ll be focusing on selling your products to an individual customer who will make purchasing decisions all by themselves.

When creating a B2C buyer persona, you’ll need to focus on your customer to uncover what their day-to-day life is like and what their purchasing decision involves.

Example #1:

In the B2C buyer persona mentioned below, you’ll notice that buyer personas don’t have to be too lengthy. A short, precise, and direct buyer persona will do just fine.

The above example is from propertyconnect.me. From the example above, you can get a detailed idea of who Rachel is and what her lifestyle and challenges are. Just by giving a quick glance at Rachel’s persona, you can tell that she stays mostly busy, has tight budget constraints, and is in need of quick and easy solutions.

Example #2:

Here’s another B2C buyer persona example from indiegamegirl.com.

In the image above, you can notice that the information is very precise and not too long. Yet, it is sufficient enough to give us an idea of who Brandi is. We can tell what Brandi’s buying process is like when purchasing shoes and also her frustration.

This example of a B2C buyer persona also includes a quote Brandi – the customer – which was not present in the earlier example.

B2B Buyer Persona Examples

Example #1:

Now we’re going to look at buyer persona examples for B2B or business-to-business companies.

Similar to B2C buyer personas, B2B buyer personas are also focused on individual customers. However, B2B buyer personas require more detailed information. We’re talking about information such as where your point of contact works, what their job role is, who they report to, how they interact with other businesses, and stuff like that.

In B2B buyer personas, you need to keep in mind that your persona will not likely be the sole decision-maker of the business.

Here is a B2B persona example from clearvoice.com which includes everything a detailed B2B buyer persona should have.

From the example above, you can see John’s goals, challenges, and expertise. You can see what his position is at his company and what decisions he can make on his own on behalf of the company.

Again, buyer personas don’t have to be too long. It should however contain all the essential information about the persona.

Example #2:

Here’s another example of a B2B buyer persona from buyerpersona.com. This buyer persona example is a lot more detailed and spans over 6 individual tabs.

While this persona contains a lot more information compared to the previous persona example, it is properly segmented in small sections. This makes it quite easy to quickly skim through the information to make sense of it.

‍Why you Do it All!

So why are you going through all the trouble creating buyer personas? Because it ultimately yields a lot of insights in the long term and answers questions such as:

• What motivates buyers to invest in your solution and not to work with another product?
• What goals do they think they can achieve with your product?
• What is preventing your buyers from buying your product?
• What factors influence the buying process?
• Which properties of your product are most important to the buyer?

All this information gives you a clear direction to focus on with your marketing and sales. This way you can emphasise the strong points found and at the same time overcome and weaken the pain points. Debating objections is perhaps even more important than emphasising strengths.

Make sure you don’t sell too much in your marketing. That is of course not the intention of inbound marketing. You can discuss the problems that your buyer persona encounters in objective blogs, but leave the real sales to the sales employees.

Have you already drawn up good buyer personas? And do you want to share your experience? We would love to see your buyer persona.

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