The people who will benefit the most from your product or service.

[Shakhawat]

Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer. They’re an essential foundational component of any inbound marketing strategy.

When they’re well-made, buyer personas can be a powerful tool for marketing-and-sales alignment and help you ensure you’re focusing your marketing and sales efforts on the people who will benefit the most from your product or service.

To learn more about how to create buyer personas, I advertising database sat down with Senior Growth Strategist Nick Frigo and Client Experience Lead Karin Krisher who help New Breed’s clients with persona creation. Here are four steps they said you need to follow when creating buyer personas.

1. Identify the Purpose of Your Buyer Personas
You should not be building buyer personas for the sake of having them. They should be created in order to be leveraged.

“If you’re not creating segments on your website, if you’re not tailoring your forms to them, if you’re not providing your salespeople with insights that come from knowing who the persona is, — why bother?” Karin says. “Understanding the purpose of having them and how you will use them is the most important thing to do before developing buyer personas.”

So, start by defining how you intend to use your buyer personas. Are you looking to better define your marketing audience so you can create a better content strategy? Does your sales team need a resource to help them identify who to seek out when prospecting? Are you trying to align your company around who you should be marketing and selling to?

In addition to creating buyer personas, you should also be establishing ideal customer profiles (ICPs), to ensure fit. While buyer personas depict the type of people your company would like to work with, ICPs represent the type of companies they work at and include firmographic information like company size, industry and annual revenue.

Finally, determine if you’re building your personas based on your current customer base or trying to create something more speculative based on a market your company is trying to expand into.

Generally, companies will have two to three personas based on their historical customer data and one built on where they want to grow.