Creating Buyer Personas, Job Stories & Hero Statements
Understand your customers (and prospective customers) better.
Creating buyer personas, job stories and hero statements are activities that help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) better. This makes it easier for you to tailor your content, messaging, product development, and services to meet the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of the members of your target audience.
For example, you may know your target buyers are HR professionals, but do you know what their specific needs and interests are? What is the typical background of your ideal buyer? In order to get a full understanding of what makes your best customers tick, it's critical to develop detailed personas for your business.
So what is a Buyer Persona?
Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers based on data and research.
They help you focus your time on qualified prospects, guide product development to suit the needs of your target customers, and align all work across your organization, including your client engagement and delivery teams.
As a result, you'll be able to attract high-value visitors, leads, and customers to your business who you'll be more likely to retain over time.
More specifically, having a deep understanding of your buyer persona(s) is critical to driving content creation, product development, sales follow-up, and really anything that relates to customer acquisition and retention.
Now that we’ve established that personas are really important to your business.
How do you create Buyer Personas?
It's all about how you obtain your market research and customer data, and then present that information within your business.
Gather Customer Information
The strongest buyer personas are based on market research as well as insights you gather from your actual customer base (through surveys, interviews, etc.).
Depending on your business, you could have as few as one or two personas, or as many as 10 or 20. But if you’re new to personas, start small — you can always develop more personas later if needed.
Here are some practical methods for gathering the information you need to develop personas:
Look through your contacts database to uncover trends about how certain leads or customers find and consume your content.
Use form fields that capture important persona information when creating forms to use on your website. For example, if all of your personas vary based on company size, ask each lead for information about company size on your forms.
Consider your sales team's feedback on the leads they're interacting with most. What generalizations can they make about the different types of customers you serve best?
Interview customers and prospects to discover what they like about your product or service.
Develop the Persona
The next step is to use your research to identify patterns and commonalities from the answers to your interview questions, develop at least one primary persona, and share that persona with the rest of the company.
Fill in your persona's basic demographic information.
Share what you've learned about your persona's motivations.
Help your sales team prepare for conversations with your persona.
Craft messaging for your persona.
Finally, make sure you give your persona a name (e.g. Finance Manager Joshua, or IT Barry) so everyone internally refers to each persona the same way, allowing for cross-team consistency.
Here is an example:
Job Stories
If you have a well-defined buyer persona, you’ve taken the first step in optimizing your marketing efforts by getting to know the type of person who is most likely to buy your products and services. However, your work is not quite complete. In order to understand what your customers are trying to do, you might want to use jobs theory, which is a way of exploring why people buy products.
Essentially, people have jobs they’re trying to get done, and they hire products to do those jobs.
How do you identify Jobs to Be Done?
If you want to uncover the job people are hiring your product to do, you’re going to need to interview some of your existing customers. One thing to keep in mind is that in sales, you should focus more on how you can help people understand the job your product does, rather than trying to think of ways to improve your product to do the job better.
As you try to define your customers’ job to be done, fit it into this standard “job story” template:
As a _______, when I _______, I want to ______ so that I can ______.
As a persona, when I situation, I want to motivation so that I can outcome.
As a Real Estate Agent, when I newly get my real estate license after being out of work for a little bit, I want to find a website builder to work with me personally so that I can set up a website for customers to find me and my new business online.
As a morning commuter, when I’m driving to work in the morning, I want to eat something so that I can have something to keep me occupied during my commute and keep me feeling full until 10:00 a.m.
Once you explore the job story, you’ll be better able to see which of your products is best for the job and start thinking about how to let your customers know.
Hero Statements
Now that you know who your persona is and what job they’re trying to get done, you’re ready to create your hero statement. Here is the format of the hero statement:
Your company is a hero to buyer persona who job to be done.
ideasy is a hero to business owners who want to establish a digital presence and get more online sales.
James is a hero to marketing enthusiasts who want to upskill and increase their earning potential.
If you haven’t fully defined your primary buyer persona yet, you can use your ideal customer profile as a first version of your hero statement. An ideal customer profile is a description of the company (not the individual buyer or end user) that's a perfect fit for your solution.
If you use your ideal customer profile, that’s okay as a temporary solution, but be sure to revisit your hero statement once you know who your primary buyer persona is, and update it to include it.
Conclusion
Now that you know who you’re a hero to, you need to put some thought into who you aren’t going to be a hero to. You can’t be a hero to everybody, and it is important to recognize that and identify those people in your (potential) customer base who you won’t be focused on in your sales efforts.
If you need to see a more detailed implementation of these, you could connect with me and pick my brain. I also have a couple of handbooks and free guides on Marketing, Sales, Growth, and everything in between. Cheers 🍹