Buyer personas can help in creating effective communication that gets your target to take action. A buyer persona is a group of people that have an interest in your product or service. Think of them as your "target" buyer. It's not uncommon to have more than one buyer persona, I highly suggest it. Your buyer personas should be based on who your ideal customer is or who you are targeting.

The development of your buyer personas will be dependent on your type of consumer.

For example:

• Business-to-Consumer (B2C) - Focus on Individuals
• Business-to-Business (B2B) - Focus on Business Groups

Your buyer personas will help you in determining the following:

• Why consumers buy your product and/or service.
• How consumers buy your product and/or service - understanding the process.

Not only do buyer personas help you in understanding your customers, but they can be used in multiple ways. You can use buyer personas to drive your content marketing, your social media marketing and your marketing communications. So, how do you get started in creating buyer personas?

You will need data based on who you are targeting and who your buyer are. You will need to develop the right questions and find the right people to ask. If you've done any market research on your consumers you should have this available, it just my require some digging. You can also use past customer data or surveys. If you are new business you may find this to be a little tougher, not impossible, you'll just need to reach out those that you consider to be your ideal customers.

Now, let's take a few moments and look at both B2C and B2B buyer personas and their development. The information below will help you in creating your interview guide. You can use this interview guide to interview customers, referrals, prospects, social media and even third-party survey networks.

When you are working with individual consumers you will need to know the following:

• What's their background?
• What are their demographics?
• How would you identify them?
• What problem do your products or services solve for them?
• What goals do they have in common? What are they trying to achieve?
• What challenges do they face?
• How can you help them?
• What objectives do you consistently face with them?

When you are working with businesses your questions will be different and you'll want to know the following:

• What do the business look like that are interested in your product and/or service? How big are they? Is there a particular employee count or revenue size you are after?
• Are there specific industries you are going after? If so, what do those industries look like?
• Do they currently buy your product and/or service? If not, why? Are there common objections that you hear?
• What problem does your product and/or service solve for them? What are their pain points that you solve?
• What are the benefits that you offer to this targeted business to help them?
• What objectives do you consistently face with them?

As you can see, obviously you will treat B2C and B2B buyer personas differently even though they have some similarities. This is mostly due to the fact that in the B2B market businesses try to streamline the purchase process, in order to save time and save money. This will impact your reach and your approach.

B2B buyer personas face different challenges. Purchase decisions within the business-to-business market are made rationally rather than emotionally. They must evaluate the business value and then make a determination on the purchase. It's not an emotionally driven purchase, so your message must impact differently. The motivation to purchase within the B2B market are about addressing a point of pain and economic impact that will increase revenue or decrease cost.

How can you use buyer personas?

After you've done the work in creating your buyer persona profiles and creating a buyer persona template, you can use this information to create valuable content that gets prospects to take action because you are speaking directly to them. You can also build a more successful sales pipeline by utilizing marketing automation software to more accurately track customer flow through your site and tweak marketing campaigns that target a specific buyer persona.