MARKETING | 7 MIN READ

20 Questions to Ask When Creating Buyer

Personas [Free Template]

Written by Lindsay Kolowich

@lkolow

Buyer personas are a crucial component of successful inbound marketing, particularly

for the sales and marketing departments. After all, the marketing team needs to know
to whom they are marketing, and the sales team needs to know to whom they are
selling.
But once you sit down to craft your buyer personas, you may find yourself staring
blankly at a white screen for some time, wondering where on earth you're supposed to
begin.

Download our free buyer persona template here to learn how to

create buyer personas for your business.

Before you spend time and money on research, ask yourself the questions below to
help you develop your personas, then use our free buyer persona template above to
share your personas with the rest of your company. 

Keep in mind you'll need a content marketing strategy to reach your buyer persona.
Want to learn the process? Check out HubSpot Academy's free content marketing
training resource page.

20 Buyer Persona Questions to Ask When Identifying Your

Audience
Questions About Their Personal Background
1. Describe your personal demographics.

Collecting demographic information is a great place to begin drafting your personas

because it's easy to obtain and starts to paint a clearer, more personal picture of your
customer. Are they married? What's their annual household income? Where do they
live? Are they male or female? How old are they? Do they have children?

2. Describe your educational background.

What level of education did they complete? Which schools did they attend, and what
did they study? Get specific here. "Boston University" is better than "liberal arts
college."

3. Describe your career path.

How did they end up where they are today? Did they major in a subject that's very
similar to or very different from their current role? Has their career track been pretty
traditional, or did they switch from another industry?

Questions About Their Company

4. In which industry or industries does your company work?

The answer to this question isn't the department in which your buyer persona works, or
the service he or she personally provides to his/her company. Your buyer persona's
industry is the type of service they deliver to their clients, and knowing this can help
you measure your business's impact in the markets you're targeting.

Depending on the challenges your buyer persona faces, it might also be worth getting
information on the industries your client's business serves, not just the actual service
they provide.

For example, if your client provides environmental services, their industry is just that --
environmental services. But if their primary clients are schools and hospitals, a good
answer to this question might ultimately be:

They are in the environmental services industry for education and medical customers.

5. What is the size of your company (revenue, employees)?

Knowing details about your persona's company like industry, size, number of
employees, and other details will especially help you when you're building the fields
for your landing page forms.

Questions About Their Role

6. What is your job role? Your title?

How long have they had this role and title? Are they an individual contributor, or do
they manage other people?

7. Whom do you report to? Who reports to you?

The importance with which you should regard your buyer persona's job and seniority
level certainly depends on the product or service you're selling.

If you're a B2C company, you may simply consider this information as another way to
better understand nuances of your persona's life.

If you're a B2B company, this piece of information becomes more crucial. Is your
persona at a managerial or director level, and well versed in the intricacies of your
industry? They'll need less education than someone at an introductory level, who may
need to loop in other decision makers before making purchasing decisions.

8. How is your job measured?

Which metric(s) is your persona responsible for? Which numbers or charts or waterfall
graphs do they look at every day? This will help you determine what makes
them successful, and what they might be worried about when it comes to "hitting their
numbers."

9. What does a typical day look like?

What time do they get to work and what time do they leave? What do they do when
they're most productive? What's their "busy work" look like?

This should include both the tasks they do for their job, as well as what happens during
the day outside their job. Are they spending more time at work or at home? Where
would they rather be? What do they like to do for fun? Who are the people in their life
that matter most? What kind of car do they drive? Which TV shows do they watch?
Heck, what outfit are they wearing? Get personal here.

10. Which skills are required to do your job?

If they were hiring someone to replace them and had to write a job description of
what's actually required, what would it say? What are the ideal skills for this job,
and how good is your persona at each of them? Where did they learn these skills? Did
they learn them on the job, at a previous job, or by taking a course?

11. What knowledge and which tools do you use in your job?

Which applications and tools do they use every single day? Every week? Understanding
what products they love (and hate) to use can help you identify commonalities in your
own product (and adjust your positioning accordingly). 

Questions About Their Challenges

12. What are your biggest challenges?

You're in business because you're solving a problem for your target audience. How
does that problem affect their day-to-day life? Go into detail, and focus on the nuances
that illustrate how that problem makes them feel.
For example, let's say your company sells personal tax software directly to consumers.
One of your personas may be a first-time tax preparer. What are the pain points of first-
time tax preparers? They're probably intimidated by the prospect of doing their taxes
by themselves for the first time, overwhelmed by a tax code they don't understand, and
confused about where to start. These pain points differ from those of a seasoned tax
preparer, whose pain points may be not knowing how to maximize the amount of their
return and find creative loopholes for deductions.

Try coming up with real quotes to refer to these challenges. For example, "It’s been
difficult getting company-wide adoption of new technologies in the past;" or "I don’t
have time to train new employees on a million different databases and platforms."

Questions About Their Goals

13. What are you responsible for?

This goes beyond the metric(s) they're measured on. What's their primary goal at
work? What about their secondary goal? Knowing these will help you learn what you
can do to help your persona achieve their goals and overcome their challenges.

14. What does it mean to be successful in your role?

What can you do to make your personas look good? Companies that take the time to
understand what makes their personas successful will likely enjoy more effective
communications from both the sales and marketing teams.

Questions About How They Learn

15. How do you learn about new information for your job?

If you're going to market and sell to these personas, you need to understand how they
consume information. Do they go online, prefer to learn in-person, or pick
up newspapers and magazines? If they're online learners, do they visit social networks?
To Google? Which sources do they trust the most -- friends, family, coworkers, or
industry experts?

16. Which publications or blogs do you read?

In an effort to piece together how a typical day in their life runs, figure out where they
regularly go to stay informed. If you know how they prefer to gather information, you
can make yourself present in those spots and work on establishing credibility in those
communities.

17. Which associations and social networks do you participate in?

You should be investing time and resources on social media marketing, but the
question is: Which social networks should you be investing more time and resources
than others? Identify the associations and social networks your buyers spend their time.
Then, you can prioritize which accounts to create and which conversations to
participate in.

Questions About Their Shopping Preferences

18. How do you prefer to interact with vendors?

The experience of purchasing your product should align with your persona's
expectations. What should their sales experience feel like? Is it consultative? How much
time do they expect to spend with a sales person? Do they anticipate an in-person
meeting, or would they rather conduct the sales process online or over the phone?

19. Do you use the internet to research vendors or products? If yes,

how do you search for information?

Again, which avenues are they using to find new information? Do they search online,
look at review websites, ask their friends and family, or something else?

20. Describe a recent purchase.

Why did you consider a purchase, what was the evaluation process, and how did you
decide to purchase that product or service?

If you can anticipate the objections your persona will have, you can be prepared for
them in the sales process and perhaps even educate them in your marketing collateral
to help allay fears right away. What might make them reticent to buy from you or any
other provider in your industry? Is this their first time purchasing a product or service of
your kind? If not, what caused them to switch products or services?

Now What?

Once you've gone through this exercise and worked out any lingering questions about
what makes your persona tick, browse through some stock imagery and find an actual
picture to associate with your persona. Going through this exercise forces you to clarify
an image of your target audience in your entire organization's mind that will help keep
your messaging consistent.

Another useful exercise is to practice being able to identify your buyer persona so you
can tailor your communications. How will you know when you're talking to this
persona? Is it their job title? Something about the way they talk or carry a
conversation? Their pain points? How they found your company? Once you've
established not only who your persona is, but also how you can identify them when you
encounter one or another, your employees will be able to maintain a consistent voice
that is still customized to each person they talk to.

Then, use our free, downloadable persona template to organize the information you've
gathered about your persona. Share these slides with the rest of your company so
everyone can benefit from the research you've done and develop an in-depth
understanding of the person (or people) they're targeting every day at work.

Want to learn about some the best real buyer personas? Check out seven companies
with awesome buyer personas.

Originally published Apr 22, 2018 8:00:00 AM, updated April 18 2018

Topics: Buyer Personas

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