Creating Your Buyer Persona In The Digital Age

At a recent HubSpot event I attended at their European headquarters in Dublin, we learned all about 'Marketing Mary' - a 42 year old married woman with two kids. 'Marketing Mary' is a marketing manager at a mid sized company who manages a team of five. Her goals in work are to manage company communications, build awareness and support her sales teams with collateral and leads. Her challenges are that she has too much to do and isn't really sure how to get there. She loves Hubspot because they have easy to use tools that make her life easier.

There's just one other thing about Marketing Mary - she doesn't exist.

What I have outlined above is the primary 'buyer persona' at Hubspot. A buyer persona, as Hubspot describe it, is a semi- fictional representation of your ideal customer based on real data and some select educated speculation about customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations and goals. They are essentially fictional characters that represent your dream customers. 'Marketing Mary' as described above, is Hubspot's dream customer.

Buyer Personas are not real people or even target markets. They are common behaviour patterns and shared pain points. They are the wishes, hopes and dreams of your ideal customers. They generally contain demographic, pychographic and geographic details of your ideal customers.

Creating buyer personas are important for many reasons - from helping get the right leads and customers to aiding product development. You can create better products and better marketing campaigns if you have a real sense of who your customers are.

In the Digital age, we've never had more resources than we do right now to help us create and communicate with our buyer personas. Customer data is now everywhere from analytics information regarding the visitors to our website to our Facebook fans and Twitter followers. We can integrate this wealth of information from these different sources to find customers most like our persona. For the Irelandhotels.com website, which I manage, Google helps us create customer profiles based on the data from our best actual customers. This way, we can identify new users with similar attributes, finding more of our ideal customers that way. We can now identify and communicate with new customers in a way previously only dreamed of. Without a clear definition of what we're actually looking for i.e. a buyer persona, this would be extremely difficult.