The Ultimate Resource Guide to Buyer Personas

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.

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? 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.)

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

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.

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.