Speaker 1: Why don't marketers regularly talk to their customers? Is it because they might stink real, real bad? No, I mean, we know that it's pretty hard to connect to the people that we're marketing to, which is why before you start selling to anyone, you really need to know who exactly you're talking to. Otherwise, this whole game ain't gonna work out for you. Buyer personas are a super valuable tool for attracting high value visitors, leads, and customers to your business. In fact, companies that use buyer personas in their marketing strategy have increased website traffic by 210%, increased email conversion by up to 10%, and boosted organic search traffic by 55%. It's a lot of percentages. So personas can drastically impact your marketing efforts. But let's start with the basics. What is a buyer persona? Put simply, it's a semi-fictional representation of what your audience looks like with all of their key details combined into one avatar or persona. Kind of looks like this. So while creating quality leads and engagement is challenging, personas are a useful way to help marketers get honest about who we're talking to. They put you in the customer's shoes to understand their challenges, pain points, and needs. Knowing who you're talking to can guide your messaging, inform relevant content, and underpin truly compelling campaigns. And it's not just marketing who benefits. Having an authentic picture of the people who buy from you helps customer service behave more empathetically by anticipating issues faster. Personas help sales connect with the people who are most likely to buy from them, saving time that would otherwise be wasted on less than ideal prospects. Your product team needs to know as much as possible about who they're building for. Giving them really crispy persona profiles will help them tailor whatever you're selling to hit that customer's sweet spot. So how can you build an accurate picture of an ideal persona? First, you need to figure out how many personas you actually need. If you're a smaller business or part of a small marketing team, it's best to start small. We recommend just one or two. Keeping your personas tight means you can make them as rich as possible. And I don't mean handing them the bag. No, I mean having as much detail as possible, and that way it's easier to get internal agreement about what those persona characteristics might be. Let's talk about how you can build a super crispy persona profile. There are three keys to creating useful and authentic persona profiles. Research, research, and research. Easy to remember, right? There's a few different levers you can pull to fill out your persona profiles. The first is internal research. A great way to build a customer persona is by talking to the people who are already talking to your customers. Reach out to your sales or customer success teams. They'll have tons of ideas and insight about your customers. Some of the questions you can ask are, what kinds of content are people engaging with most on our website? What's the most common query we get from customers? What are their most common pain points? What are the most common objections the sales teams hears? On top of this, you can leave feedback forms. Just remember to keep them short to have the best chance of completion. Only ask the most pressing questions. Giving people agency to influence their experiences with your brand in exchange for feedback is more than a fair trade, and most customers know that. You can also add incentives, offer discounts, or early access to customers who give you feedback. Another way is market research. This is about finding where your prospects hang out. Where, how, and why they buy. If you're running Google Analytics, you can find out how customers are engaging with similar businesses. You can look up market leaders and see key demographics around their audiences, including average age, gender, and interests. Google Analytics Market Explorer also shows you the ways these people connect with similar brands, including paid, organic, referral, or direct. Seeing how other brands in your space engage audiences is a really valuable way to build a picture of consumers' behavior. If it's true for enough of your competitors, it's likely true for you. And once you have that information, you can use social media to research people on Facebook and LinkedIn by title, industry, location, interests, et cetera. All of these methods will help you gradually build up your understanding of how buyers interact with your part of the world. And if you can ask your happiest customers and biggest advocates really nicely, you may even get some customer interviews. Getting FaceTime with your customers is like getting picked first in kickball. Doesn't happen often, but when it does, you're feeling good, you know what I'm saying? Holding interviews, one-on-ones, or group discussions are all great ways to get candid feedback, feedback that rarely shows up in its entirety on a feedback form or survey. Here are a few tips to get the most out of your customer interviews. Who, what, why, and how. Who, what's your occupation and your experience like? How do you prefer sales to approach you? What do you need to get clear on before you decide to buy? What, what are your goals? What are the things keeping you from achieving those goals? Why, this one is about your business and brand. Find out why the customer chose you. Why did they find your brand attractive? What do you do that the competition doesn't do or doesn't do as well? And finally, how. How does your product or service solve their problems? If you can get honest answers to these questions from your clients, that'll add so much value to your personas. You've got the info, now you need a visual aid to put it all together. Give your personas names, make them feel as real as possible. This does a couple things. It makes it easy for other teams to share and digest. It's a single source of truth that everyone in the business can agree on and refer back to. So for example, when your salesperson picks up the phone, they've got a clear image of the kind of person they're going to be talking to. But keep in mind, once you've developed your buyer personas, you need to keep them up to date. We recommend reviewing them every year so you know they're still relevant. Don't have a template on hand? Well, no sweat. You can download our free buyer persona template down in the description below. It's got everything you need to make a crispy and rich persona profile. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go make my own persona profile about myself. And top three things, likes kickball, likes being chosen first in kickball, and wants to go to kick first in kickball. So if that fits your business, let me know. I'll see you next time. I can't find this client info. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform. So it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned. No out of sync spreadsheets or dueling databases. HubSpot, grow better.