Why are buyer personas so important to B2B companies? Buyer personas (see a definition here) are a crucial component of a successful inbound marketing plan, particularly for sales and marketing teams. After all, your marketing team needs to know who they are marketing to, and sales needs to know who they are selling to.

But once you sit down to craft your buyer personas, you may find yourself staring blankly at your screen, wondering where you’re supposed to begin.

Before you spend time and money researching your ideal buyers, ask yourself these 5 questions so you can get started with an outline of who your personas are. As you go through these questions, remember that buyer personas should be used to help you understand your ideal prospective customers better.

Personas make it easier to tailor your content, messaging and service to the specific needs, behaviors and concerns of different groups. In other words, you may know your target buyers are CEOs, but do you know what their specific needs and interests are? In order to get a full understanding of what makes your best customers tick, it’s critical to start developing an idea of their day-to-day challenges, goals and more.

1. What is your ideal buyer's demographic information?

Collecting demographic information is a great place to begin when drafting your personas because this information is easy to obtain and it starts to paint a clear picture of your customer.

When gathering demographic information, you should consider the following questions to better understand the basic information about your buyers.

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Education
• Annual income
• Marital status

2. What are your personas' job roles? What do they think their roles are? What are their titles?

Understanding what your persona does for their organization and what their job title could be is extremely important. This information will help you better understand what that person does and what they would like to do. It also helps you understand that the same job can be classified in many different ways.

While you are answering this question, don’t feel like there is only one right answer. A persona’s role can include many different aspects. For example, your personas may think their roles differ based on their company or industry.

3. What does a normal day (both personal and professional) look like?

Consider each persona’s work-life balance and ask yourself the following questions:

• What time do they get to work and what time do they leave?
• What do they do when they’re most productive?
• What’s their “busy work” look like?
• Are they spending more time at work or at home? Where would they rather be?
• What do they like to do for fun?
• Who are the people in their life that matter most?

These questions will help you tailor when you should send your messages and what type of message each persona would prefer to receive. For example, if you know your personas like to hop on social media during their morning commute, you can create targeted messages that reach them during that time on their favorite platforms.

4. What are their goals? 

What things are your personas working towards today, this week, this month and this year? How does your persona intend to reach their goals? What type of help could they use in reaching those goals?

Understanding a persona’s goals, big or small, puts their needs into perspective. Use this information while creating content to show your personas how your product or service can help them accomplish their goals.

5. What are their biggest challenges?

You’re in business because you’re solving a problem for your target audience. Figure out what each persona’s’ biggest challenges are on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. How does that challenge affect their day-to-day life? How do they tackle their challenges? Where do they go to gain information about how to overcome those challenges? Brainstorm a couple ideas to start.

What’s next? Once you’ve answered these questions you should have a good starting point as to what makes your persona tick. Congratulations on taking the first steps towards understanding your buyers on a deeper level! If you want to flesh out your personas even more, click on the button below for a full buyer persona template. Need help understanding your ideal buyers? Contact Milwaukee marketing agency, Accelity Marketing!