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Updated by Tanya Smith on Nov 14, 2016
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The Ultimate Resource Guide to Buyer Personas

A buyer persona is an imaginary representation of a person who would ideally purchase your products or services. A buyer persona helps guide decisions you make about product development, short and long form messaging, and overall marketing. It’s important to know who your prospective customers are, to understand what they need, and to engage them with compelling calls to action. This is a list of articles and resources collected to help you create your own buyer persona. (Complete blog post here: http://tanyasmithonline.com/069)

What CMOs Need To Know About Buyer Personas [Forbes]

What do Chief Marketing Officers need to know? When used correctly, buyer personas can make the creation of marketing strategies and campaigns straightforward and clear, unleashing the power of the smart creatives in your organization.

8 Rookie Mistakes You Might Be Making With Buyer Personas

Don't make these 8 rookie mistakes! Creating buyer personas is an essential part of building a successful inbound marketing strategy. Buyer personas help you better understand your current and potential customers, what their pain points are, what information they need, and how you can position your offering to meet their needs. But these mistakes can cost you time and money:

  • Having too many personas leave you confused and makes it difficult to streamline your messages
  • Not thinking about "negative" personas - think about who you don't want to have as a customer
  • Only using the persona for your marketing instead of integrating this into your entire strategy
  • Thinking personas are real people vs. as generalizations
  • Describing as an aspirational (I wish I had) vs realistic view of the type of customers you can serve now
  • Using old-school demographics rather than psychographics - i.e. what their typical day might look like
  • Not researching your personas and continuing to build on it over time
  • Assuming development of a persona is difficult...when there are all kinds of resources - like this list!
How Many Buyer Personas Should You Have? [Business 2 Community]

How many buyer personas should you have? To get a better understanding of your customer's needs and interests and figure out how your product/service can attend to them, you may have to create one or several buyer personas for your business. (Personally, my ideal count is between 1 and 3 for a small business or solo entrepreneur. Anything more gets too difficult to manage.)

10 Ways to Get Into Your Customers' Heads Beyond Creating Buyer Personas

Exceptional insights create exceptional businesses. How exceptional? Let's look at a real case study about what happens when you can read your customer's minds: Let's talk about Steve Jobs. Jobs knew his customers well. He could anticipate their needs, exceed their expectations and secure their loyalty. From these, the article will point out ten ways to get into customers’ minds. Use them to complement, or in place of, traditional buyer personas:

  1. Review your data
  2. Interview customer service reps (or your team if you have one)
  3. Get innovative (be sure to catch the Henry Ford quote in this point: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said 'faster horses")
  4. Build rapport through emails
  5. Become a good listener
  6. Speak your customers' language
  7. Research online
  8. Survey your customers
  9. Think like your customers
  10. Talk to other marketers
How to Create Buyer Personas [Infographic]

Buyer personas give you insight into how to best engage with your various customer types. But before you start creating those personas, take time to do the research. When gathering data about your customers, dig deep into both Web analytics and your own business intelligence, suggests WSI in the infographic.

How to Create Your Buyer Persona - Tanya Smith Online

Having a clear understanding of who your ideal customer is allows you to stop spending time and money advertising to the wrong audience. Instead, you can focus on creating content and copy that really connect with your ideal customer.