Template to define your buyer persona

As a marketing manager, you understand the importance of defining, identifying, and creating buyer personas. That's why we're offering our guide to help you keep your buyer persona and target audience updated!😉

What is a Buyer Persona? 👥

Let’s do an intro for the newbies: According to HubSpot (master of this topic), a buyer persona is a "potential semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customer".

Creating a buyer persona is crucial to crafting tailored campaigns for inbound marketing and more. If you don't have it clear check this Guide to Creating Buyer Personas For Your Business.

If you're a fan of ChatGPT, check out this video on how it can help you define your buyer persona! 👇

Why do you need to define your buyer persona?✨

Defining your ideal buyer persona, which may take about a day, offers numerous benefits for you and your marketing team:

• Keeps your marketing team focused. As marketing efforts become increasingly complex, it's easy to lose focus. By understanding your target market, customer types, and their interests, you can shape your strategy and maintain your team's focus.
• Adapts to new trends. People change, and so does your audience. A buyer persona can help identify new goals, challenges, channels, demographics, interests, or habits to frame your campaigns.
• Identifies new objections and pain points. Conversations with clients, colleagues, or other sources can yield valuable insights for creating buyer personas and challenging existing assumptions.
• Boosts customer engagement. Getting to know your company's ideal customers, even if it's just a few or through surveys, can increase their engagement with your brand and assist in crafting personalized marketing campaigns.

💡Look to other buyer persona examples from Semrush for inspiration.

How do define your buyer persona? 📝

We'll share our quick guide to help you define your buyer persona:

Step 1: Develop a strategy based on your resources

Step 2: Gather information from the market

Step 3: Create a questionnaire for your customers

Step 4: Interview around 30 clients

Step 5: Compile the information to create your buyer persona

Step 6: Share your buyer persona to your marketing team

Step 1: Develop a strategy based on your resources 🕰

Creating buyer personas, who represent your dream customers, is super important. But hey, let's not make it a big, complicated task - keep it simple, okay?

As a marketing manager, here's a helpful tip: base your strategy on what you have in hand - your team, your time, your budget, and of course, your content marketing strategy. By doing this, you'll get a clear picture of what really matters to your potential buyers or your ideal customers.

Say, for example, you have a small but mighty team of just three people. In that case, you might want to stick to a basic questionnaire and have a chat with your top three customers. Sounds doable, right?

Step 2: Gather information from the market 👂

It's super important to keep an ear to the ground and watch what competitors or like-minded companies are doing.

To help with your sales and marketing, why not use some real-world data to research and create a target profile? It could be really beneficial!

Also, don't forget to catch up with your sales team and gather their thoughts and feedback. Just make sure you're getting the info straight from the horse's mouth!

Step 3: Create a questionnaire for your customers 💬

Let's go on a little adventure! Conducting a personal survey can help you uncover the challenges your lovely customers are grappling with.

It's a pretty good idea to come up with about 10-20 questions that are open-ended - this way, you get to hear all the juicy details. Here are some examples to get you started:

• What is your role in the company / your job title?
• How many people are above you? And below?
• What are your main goals?
• How are you reaching your goals? / What are your main tasks?
• What are your daily challenges? / What are your main pains at work?
• How can we make this process easier for you?
• What are your strengths and weaknesses?
• What is your business agenda? / How do you manage your time?
• How many tools do you use at work?
• What tools do you use to detect trends?
• What are your main sources for creating content?
• What kind of customer support do you offer to your customers?

For more inspiration, check out Hubspot's 20 best questions.

Just a friendly reminder to customize your questions according to your specific needs. You don't need to collect a mountain of information from potential customers, but do make sure you've got all the important bases covered.

Step 4: Interview around 30 clients 🔊

We totally get it, meeting one-on-one with customers can sound like a daunting task! If your schedule is tight or resources are limited, don't worry, we've got some easy solutions for you.

Consider creating an online questionnaire, digging into some insightful articles, or even chatting with your sales team for some insider info.

These handy options are here to help you gather as much information as possible, making the process of building your buyer persona a breeze.

And remember, one-on-one chats are an awesome way to connect with your customers!

Step 5: Compile the information to create your buyer persona ✏️

We've put together a buyer persona template in Notion for you, complete with examples to help you get started!

Download your free our buyer persona template!

If you use Notion, define your buyer persona with our template and share it with your team.

Download the template

Now, if you're not a Notion user (don't worry, we're still friends! 😜), we've got your back too. Check out these related articles with awesome templates that you might find helpful:

• Services Adwhite buyer persona template.
• Hubspot buyer persona template.
• Hootsuite buyer persona template.
• Smartbugmedia buyer persona template.

Step 6: Share your buyer persona with your marketing team 👤

The last step, and perhaps the most exciting one, is to share your buyer persona research documentation with everyone on your team. Trust me, it's not just another task, it's a major milestone for us marketers!

Our in-depth investigations shouldn't be our little secret. Let's share it with the entire team and the company. Who knows, other departments might find our work helpful too. Plus, they might just have some brilliant ideas to make it even better!

👉Extra step: define your market target

Are you done with your buyer persona? Why don’t you try your market targets analysis? 

This analysis focuses on the group rather than the individuals. For instance, we focus on the businesses where our buyer persona is employed to make it simple to distinguish between the type of business and the buyer persona's role.

We leave you with our template to define your market target in Notion.

These two analyses will give you a clear idea of how to design your campaigns and which channels to begin experimenting with specifically. Hope you start using it and find value in bringing it into your game plan!