A buyer persona, also called a marketing persona, describes a typical member of the target segment or audience to whom you are marketing. It offers clues as to how you can best engage with them, both in terms of meeting their needs and in creating messaging that resonates with them. Once you've laid out your personas, what do you do with them?

What to Do With Buyer Personas

If you have multiple personas, it will be challenging to meet all their needs all the time – but establishing marketing campaigns that precisely influence them is a good start. You can even create a marketing content calendar that includes content for each persona based on the priorities and strategic goals of your company or organization.

Questions to Consider for Marketing Content

Once you’ve defined buyer personas, use them as a tool to guide your marketing message. When creating content, review the relevant persona(s)and ask yourself:

• Whom am I trying to reach?
• How are they different from other groups of people we reach through marketing?
• What problems or concerns do they have that our company or organization can solve?
• How can we clearly communicate our ability to take care of those needs for them?Another way to look at this is considering what value we provide – and develop value propositions specific to each persona.
• What marketing channel(s) are they most likely to respond to? If their demographic isn’t known for using social media, for example, creating a social media campaign to connect with them is probably not your best option.
  

How Do I Test Buyer Personas?

Your buyer personas shouldn’t be written in stone – they should change as you learn more about your target segments and what their needs are. One way to test the accuracy of your personas is through market research. This can be as simple as interviewing people who fit the profile of each persona (check out this blog post from HubSpot with some great interview tips), or as involved as hiring a market research firm to conduct surveys or focus groups. Collecting demographic data from your marketing analytics platforms will also help you understand whether you are reaching the personas you are trying to reach.

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