Do you know who your ideal customers are? How much do you know about them? Constructing buyer personas can help you identify the right customers to attract, and how to relate to them on a human level.

What are buyer personas?

Buyer personas are fictional profiles that describe your ideal audience based on data collected on your actual customers.

Why are buyer personas important?

Do you want to understand your customers better? Creating buyer personas will allow you identify your target audience's behaviors, concerns and needs. This, in turn, will help you create more effective content, marketing, sales, product development and customer service strategies to add value to your customer.

Ideal buyer personas are based on research data collected from your actual customers. Understanding the differences between your current customers can help you segment your audience and deliver messaging that is optimized to solve problems for each group.

Pamela Vaughan (@pamelump) outlines an effective strategy to create buyer personas in these 4 simple steps.

1. Identifying your buyer

Collecting customer information can be done with a phone call, an email or even an online survey. It is helpful to ask questions that identify demographic information in order to identify what backgrounds your customers come from, as well as their behaviors.

2. What are their goals and challenges?

Understanding what motivates a customer and what holds them back is essential to delivering the benefits of your product or service in a personalized way. Ask them to tell you what they are trying to achieve and what roadblocks are standing in the way of their success. Identify how you can help them achieve their goals or overcome their challenges.

3. Help your team prepare

Including actual quotes from your interaction with the customer can help identify who they are, what they want and what concerns they might have. List any objections to your product or service so your team can address them.

4. Craft a message to your buyer persona

Include any buzzwords or descriptive language you notice during your interaction to reflect the tone your team should take with the prospect and how to describe a solution to each persona. Create a custom elevator pitch that would be well received.

Finally, give each persona a name that describes the person and their profession, as well as a representative image. A name and photograph will further help your team visualize the potential customer they are communicating with.

Have more questions on how to build buyer personas? Need help creating a script or survey? Write a comment below and I’d be happy to help!