Creating buyer personas is often the first step we take when creating a new marketing strategy.

It’s definitely the first step we should take when developing a content marketing strategy.

In this post, we'll look at two common approaches to developing buyer personas: demographic-based and jobs-to-be-done-based and then show you how we combined these two methods to create our better-than-the-sum-of-its-parts hybrid buyer persona -- our Super Persona. 

 
The Super Persona

First Things First: Know Your Audience

To create content your audience wants to read, you need to know your audience. And the more precisely you define your audience the more likely you are to write content that resonates and, ultimately, converts.

The first approach we'll look at is one most marketers are familiar with. I'll call it the Demographic Buyer Persona.

With this approach we flesh out the persona with the goal of creating a living breathing person, complete with a name, a job title, wants and needs. You can use your current customers as a base for answering these questions -- though you should be aiming to think of "types" rather than specific individuals.

Questions you'll ask your imaginary persona (and then answer yourself) include:

• What's your demographic info – age, gender, location, family, etc.?
• What's your job title and level of seniority?
• What does a day in your life look like? Tell me about work and home.
• Where do you go for information? What websites, social media platforms and news channels, etc do you frequent?
• What are your job struggles?
• What are your job goals?

Answering these questions results in a person that looks something like this:

Entry-level but Eager Edgar is a 24 year old male college graduate with a degree in Marketing. He is unmarried with no kids and just starting out at his first "real" job. He works in a cubicle in a sea of cubicles and is eager to stand out to his manager. This means he comes in first, works through lunch and leaves last. He spends his free time researching his field and loves to offer new ideas to his boss. He reads articles on Mashable, HubSpot and follows Seth Godin. He struggles with being taken seriously by his managers but is dedicated to contributing in a helpful way to his team and getting promoted within a year.

Eager Edgar

The theory of this method is that you can always look at your marketing strategy though the lens of Edgar and see if it matches up with what this persona will respond to -- in other words, what would Edgar do?

A second, less-known approach to buyer personas is the Jobs-to-be-done Buyer Personas.

With this approach you don’t worry about the who. Instead, you try to figure out the what and the why.

The premise is this: we “hire” products and services to do a job. Additionally, we are always “switching” between different potential hires – meaning we choose one solution to our problem over other viable options.

Know the job your hired to do.

Your goal as a marketer is to figure out what job your product or service is hired to do and why customers switch to your solution versus alternative options.

A concrete example: Fast Food Milkshakes.

A fast food restaurant was seeking to improve sales on their milkshake. They held focus groups and gathered lots of data on flavors, packaging, pricing. They made the improvements their customers said they wanted. But sales did not improve.

What?! 

To try to solve the riddle, a research group went out to one of the restaurants in the early morning hours and watched as customer after customer came inside, ordered a milkshake to go and left to get in their cars. They only ordered a milkshake. Nothing else. The demographic varied, there was no clear type of morning-milkshake-buyer.

When the researchers questioned the milkshake buyers as to why they purchased milkshakes for breakfast they learned this: Milkshakes are filling, delicious and portable. They are a perfect breakfast to consume during the morning commute.

This was a lightbulb moment. Now that they understand the job their product is hired to do, they can improve it (think spill-resistant lids and thicker milkshakes). And they can tailor the messaging and campaigns to reflect the jobs their product is hired to do. This messaging doesn’t care if you are a mother of four heading to Saturday morning soccer practice or a high-powered executive heading to an 8 a.m. board meeting. Both are hiring the product for the same job and will therefore respond to improved product and improved marketing campaigns with the same enthusiasm.

(I first heard about this at Inbound 2016 from Rebekah Radice. An overview of her presentation is summed up in this post.)

We love the Jobs to Be Done approach. But it leaves out some things that are important for fleshing out a full strategy. So we've made some tweaks.

A better way: Our hybrid approach to buyer personas (Super Personas)

Since both of these methods to creating buyer personas have merit, why not take the best of both and create something even better?

At a minimum, you need to answer these questions:

• Who is your customer (demographic basics)?
• What motivates them (get to the heart of the matter)?
• What specific job are they hiring your product/service to do?
• Why do they hire your product/service to solve their problems?
• Where do they get their information (what websites, social media platforms, news sources, etc.)?

You need to know and document all of this. And it needs to guide your marketing decisions. Every day.

And here’s why.

You need to go where your customers are.

Knowing where your customers hang out lets you know where to put your content and ads. Posting Snapchat stories if your customer is a baby boomer is a waste of time. Creating a tightly curated Instagram account speaks to millennials.

You need to know the real job your product is hired to do. And it's not always what's on the label.

Uncovering your customer’s underlying motivations allows you to create content and messaging that resonates. A CEO wants to see ROI. An up-and-coming manager wants you to make him look really efficient and really smart. Do they want to buy software or do they want to free up time for more important tasks?

You need to articulate what your customer can do instead of hiring your product/service.

Being crystal clear on why customers hire you instead of their other options is invaluable. This is your differentiator. And it’s not “we’re really good at what we do.”

Don't ever forget your reason for being.

Answering these questions means you dig deeper and think harder about your product or service and why people choose you over every other option out there. This is your reason for being (a company, that is).

Some closing thoughts.

Marketing is as much an art as a science. There is no end to best-practice guidelines to be followed. But true innovation happens when you step outside of the known and start putting together brand new, creative solutions to common problems. So don't be afraid to test out new ideas. I hope this gives you a little inspiration on ways to tweak your strategy.

Want more? Check out our Complete Guide to Internet Marketing. It will give you a strong foundation from which to launch your digital marketing strategy.