What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is a recognizable profile of your ideal buyer, built from real knowledge about who they are, what they want to achieve and which challenges hold them back. Instead of writing for a vague audience, you focus on a concrete person with a name, a role and a buying behaviour. That makes your marketing much sharper, because you know who you are talking to.

How do you create a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is not based on assumptions, but on real conversations with customers and prospects. In practice you map out a few things:

• Their role and responsibilities within the company.
• The goals they want to reach and are measured on.
• The problems and doubts that hold them back from buying.

From that you build a profile that helps your whole team keep the same person in mind. The more concrete, the more useful, because a persona that is too general helps no one.

What is the difference with an ideal customer profile?

A buyer persona is about the person, an ideal customer profile about the company. The ideal customer profile describes which type of organization fits you perfectly, think of sector, size and challenge. The buyer persona zooms in on the people within that company who are involved in the buying decision.

In B2B you rarely buy alone: there are often several decision-makers, each with their own concerns. That is why in practice you work with several personas within the same ideal customer profile. At Customer Impact we work exclusively in B2B and never for a webshop, precisely because that more complex buying decision requires you to understand who is all around the table.

Why is a buyer persona important?

Without a buyer persona you write for everyone and truly reach no one. With a sharp profile you know which message lands, which channel your buyer uses and which doubts you need to remove. That makes your marketing more efficient and your leads more relevant.

At Customer Impact we use personas to have marketing and sales aim at the same person. If marketing has a different picture of the buyer than sales, campaigns deliver leads sales cannot use. By building an honest persona profile together, based on real customers and not on wishful thinking, we steer on customers and revenue rather than on vanity metrics. Keep your personas alive too: as you get to know your market better, you refine them, so they keep matching who actually buys.