Buyer Persona Canvas

Defining buyer personas is the starting point of every process which aims to generate growth. Read this first if you want tips on how to create relevant personas that are useful for your business:

Learn from current Customer Data

Look at real data from current customers, or interview current customers.

Customer service and sales teams often have heaps of buyer data you can browse through. So interview your own experts.

If you have demographics and interest reports enabled in Google Analytics, you can pull insightful audience reports.

Carry out market research

When creating a buyer persona, you're essentially creating a personality that embodies a key segment of your audience - and the first step to accomplishing this is to conduct thorough research. To get an estimate of who your customers are, what they want, and what they're looking for, you might need to hold surveys and polls via your social media channels and look at your competitors to see how their customers interact with them online; this will help you gain a better understanding of who you're speaking to on your channels.

Check your site analytics

More data has been created in the last two years than in the whole previous history of the human race. That’s a lot of data. You can harness that data to strategically focus your marketing efforts and reach out to your customers in a valuable way.

Inside your site analytics, you'll be able to see where your site visitors came from, the keywords they used to find you, and how long they stayed on site once they arrived. This type of data is essential to creating buyer personas as it shows the search terms that led your audience to your site, as well as the devices and platforms they used to get there.

Discover where your customers are hanging out

Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Think of where they hang out online and in person. We’re talking forums, events, organizations – even the videos they watch on YouTube. Then, spend time in those spaces simply listening

Most important: Talk both to your existing customers and the customers you aim to acquire

If you have limited time for creating buyer personas, start here!

To understand your personas’ psychographics in-depth, your best bet is to talk to both your existing customers and the customers you want to have. The most effective way to do this research is to meet them face-to-face or pick up the phone and call them.

During an interview try to discuss real-life challenges or successes your persona has encountered. From actual situations, you get a deeper insight into pains and how your persona has solved those. Consider every question and try to understand why your persona acted as she/he did. Human stories about challenges, successes, and customer jobs to be done are key to clarifying your value proposition.

Place both value proposition and buyer persona on the same canvas

Bring your company’s value proposition on the same page with buyer personas. This way you can see the coherent picture where your value proposition, position, touchpoints, and channels line up with the buyer persona’s pains, gains, and customer jobs to be done.

What to do next after you have defined the first buyer personas?

The next step is to use the personas and create a customer journey map. Personas are the starting point for a successful customer journey map. A customer journey explains what happens along the way, to whom, and how it happens – which is why you need to know who is embarking on the journey.

By mapping your business' customer journeys, you'll be able to pinpoint pain points and areas of success, both for your customers and within your organization. Personas and journey maps together help shift companies’ focus from inside-out to outside-in.