When you’re ready to start Inbound Marketing for your destination or brand, you may be wondering where to start. You may have a diverse customer base and you will need to focus your activities by segmenting your customers.

The best place to start is with Buyer Personas.

What are Buyer Personas? At it’s simplest, Buyer Personas are a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer base. Of course, these “ideal customers” are a collection of your research and real data of your current users or customers. It’s a great strategy to start marketing to the right people the right way.

We’ve been working with a client on their Inbound Marketing and this is how we helped them with their Buyer Personas.

1. Identify Your Ideal Customers - Every customer or user that pays you cannot be “ideal”. You want to really drill down and think about the person that will continue to do long term, repeat business with you.

2. Bring Your Personas to Life - Once you have identified your ideal customer(s), bring your persona to life. This is where you really want to build the story of your persona and include as many details as you can. Even if it has nothing to do with your business. In doing this exercise, this helps shape the way you market toward that persona. To build personas, you may have to get on the phone and have a conversation with someone that could fit your persona. In doing some of these informational interviews, we’ve gained new insights that we didn’t know before. Most interviews only took 35-45 minutes.

3. Give Them Names - This may sound a bit silly, but once you’ve figured out your ideal customers, giving them names will really help bring this persona to life. One of our personas is “Chief Marketing Office Charlie”. Don’t get too caught up if the name should be male or female. If you’re selling women’s shoes, then make it female. If you’re selling software, then it doesn’t matter.

This persona profile can now be shared throughout your organization, from sales to marketing, to product development. By sharing your personas throughout your organization, the ideas will flow you will discover new ways to market and bring value to this persona.