The 9 questions to ask when creating buyer personas cover demographics, job and seniority, a day in their life, pain points, values, information sources, buying-experience expectations, common objections, and how to identify the persona when you meet one. Answer all nine and you have enough to segment lists, score leads, and write copy that lands.

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your customers, and it is a crucial component of inbound marketing and sales: the marketing team needs to know to whom they are marketing, and the sales team needs to know to whom they are selling. You can define your buyer persona (or personas) by researching your existing customer base - the questions below guide that research.

Questions to Ask When Developing Personas

1. What is their demographic information? Demographic information about your personas is a great place to start because it is easy to obtain. It will help you perform more targeted offline and online marketing and paint a picture of who your personas are: How old are they? What's their annual household income? Where do they live? 2. What is their job and level of seniority? You should look at your persona's job and seniority level depending on the product or service you're selling. A B2C company may simply consider these additional ways to get to know a buyer persona. If you're a B2B company, though, your buyer persona's job and level become more crucial. They will help you understand the kinds of information your customers need about your industry and the time it takes to decide on a purchase. 3. What does a day in their life look like? Now that you have an idea of some of your persona's personal characteristics, try to piece together how a typical day in their life runs. Your persona could spend Sunday mornings checking emails at the office and afternoons in a teashop, meeting with clients. On weekends, they could be out playing golf. Once you've done this exercise, browse through some stock imagery, find an actual picture to associate with your persona, and share it throughout your organisation. 4. What are their pain points? You're in business because you're solving a problem for your target audience. How does that problem affect their day-to-day lives? How does the problem make them feel? Let's say your company sells tax software to businesses. If your persona is a new business owner, they may feel overwhelmed. On the other hand, a more experienced persona may feel the pressure of keeping up with new tax laws. 5. What do they value most? Once you know their pain points, it will be easier to understand what they value and what they don't. Ask yourself what would make your persona get really, really excited about your product or service. For example, that new business owner will probably value a simple, educational, and user-friendly product for preparing taxes.

Personas only pay off when they drive your CRM. We turn persona answers into HubSpot segmentation, lead scoring, and routing - talk to our HubSpot consultants.

6. Where do they go for information? If you're going to market and sell to your buyer persona, you need to understand how they consume information. Do they search through Google? Do they prefer to meet in person? Do they read books or magazines? Which sources do they trust the most - friends, family, coworkers, or industry experts? When you know this, you can place your content where your persona goes and establish credibility in those communities. 7. What experiences are they looking for when shopping for products and services? Align how you present your products and services with your buyer persona's expectations. If your persona expects certain product features, highlight those in your messages. If your persona enjoys the classroom environment, design group training sessions for them. 8. What are their most common objections to your product or service? If you can anticipate the objections your persona will have, you can be prepared for them in the sales process and even help allay their fears - by educating them through your marketing collateral. What might make them hesitant about buying 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? 9. How can you identify them? Now that you have a great understanding of what makes your persona tick, you have to be able to identify them. How will you know when you're talking to this persona? It could be something about the way they speak or how they found your company.

Once you have the answers to these 9 questions, your sales and marketing teams have a solid basis for how they deliver messages, products, and services to your real customers. HubSpot offers a free Make My Persona tool for turning these answers into a shareable persona document.

Ready to put your personas to work? Our HubSpot consulting team builds the segmentation, lead scoring, and reporting that turn persona research into pipeline.

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