Easy Steps To Create Accurate Buyer Personas for Your SaaS Business

A specific, accurate buyer persona is one of the secrets to software-as-a-service (SaaS) success. It helps you customize every business aspect, from marketing to product development, to your target market’s unique needs.

This article describes the basic steps that a SaaS marketing agency takes to reveal and develop the right buyer personas. It also discusses the following:

• Elements composing a persona.
• Some good examples.
• Difference between a buyer and a brand persona.

Creating detailed personas takes time and effort but helps your brand survive amid fierce market competition and challenges. Use this blog post as your guide.

Let’s go!

Want to know how we help SaaS businesses stand out from the crowd? Watch this video to learn how DAP makes it happen!

What Is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your target market. It has the following elements:

Some marketers use “buyer persona” and “brand persona” interchangeably, but they have distinct meanings. Sometimes called a brand archetype, a brand persona is a fictional representation of the organization. It conveys the brand’s personality and embodies its values.

However, both work together to align marketing with the business’s goals and user needs.

Suppose you are a SaaS healthcare platform targeting urgent-care clinics. Your brand and buyer persona might look like this:

A SaaS marketing agency then develops a thorough demand- and lead-generation plan based on these personas:

• Develop educational content about improving clinic efficiency and patient satisfaction to nurture leads. Share via blog posts, podcasts, and social media.
• Recruit influencers and industry leaders to review the product and speak about it on their platforms to build trust and credibility.
• Optimize website and materials for keywords such as “urgent care software,” “clinic management system,” and “improving patient experience” to attract searcher personas.
• Highlight reliable, empathetic, and patient-focused brand messaging in all content.
• Develop case studies demonstrating success in improving metrics, such as patient wait time and care quality, to appeal to medical director challenges.
• Conduct free trials and demos for prospects to experience the product benefits firsthand. Provide dedicated onboarding support.

   Benefits of Developing SaaS Buyer Personas

One of the primary reasons to create SaaS buyer personas is to run targeted marketing and sales efforts. 

Your offers, content, and messaging become more effective in converting when they resonate with the audience. They see themselves in the examples, connect to the frustrations you outline, and believe your product is the best solution. 

Deeply understanding your target users also drives adoption, retention, and expansion revenue. Personas help you map out your customers’ journeys and understand their evolving needs. This identifies opportunities to upsell additional features or products that complement their use cases.

Buyer personas are also useful for sales by letting them customize pitches and demos. This level of personalization helps build connections and close deals. They benefit customer-success teams that handle post-purchase support as well. The data helps them anticipate needs.

In addition, the process often reveals your market effectiveness. Are you attracting the right leads? Do they understand the product’s features and benefits well? Are your brand and buyer personas aligned?

The rich insights that buyer personas provide are invaluable for strategic planning and execution across SaaS organizations. 

Five Steps in Creating Buyer Personas

Now that you understand buyer personas, how do you create them? A SaaS marketing agency often follows these steps:

   1. Collect Data 

Data is the foundation for any buyer persona, but the collection methods and types of information vary slightly between existing businesses and startups that have not yet launched a product.

Data collection for existing SaaS organizations is often easier and more accurate. It is also less risk-averse to privacy issues because the businesses rely on first-party information. This is data that their market willingly provides. These include demographics, such as names and family status, when they fill out forms or mailing lists.

The organization also analyzes customer-support tickets. These usually uncover common questions and pain points that their users experience. Additionally, marketing analytics reveal the content and messaging that resonate best with the audience. 

Collecting data requires more market research for startups that have not yet launched a product. They typically do the following:

• Interview potential customers about their problems and desired solutions.
• Study competitors and alternative solutions to see current offerings.
• Hypothesize about customer segments and their needs.
• Rely on third-party information from large industry or government databases.
• Conduct market analysis and forecast possible consumer needs.

The startup might also partner with existing related businesses for information sharing. Someone creating an analytics platform works with a digital marketing agency. It offers free or discounted product access in exchange for feedback from the agency’s clients who match their target customer profile.

The data-collection and analysis processes usually take two to six weeks. Personas should then evolve over time as you get more information. 

   2. Identify Buyer Persona Groups and Group Them

The second step is identifying persona groups and segmenting them based on the collected and analyzed data.

Group them according to their shared attributes. Look at the roles, industries, company sizes, pain points, and motivations to find patterns. 

For example, you might identify a small business owner persona, a marketing manager persona, and an IT director persona. Name your groups appropriately based on these common characteristics. 

Choose two to three primary personas to focus on initially. Trying to develop more usually leads to the following problems:

• Determining the right messaging, product development, and marketing efforts becomes more challenging. You risk spreading resources too thinly across many small segments rather than prioritizing the most important customers.
• A “crowded persona” often results in generic content.
• It limits relatability. Customers will struggle to identify themselves among indistinct personas. The most compelling personas are concrete and draw a clear picture of the target customer.
• Referencing many personas at once often paralyzes product, pricing, and other business decisions. Which one do you optimize first? 

Take your time to identify the right primary personas to prevent wasting resources on indistinct or low-value segments. 

   3. Build the Persona Details and Align Them with Customer Data

Now that you already have the groups and the data, build the detailed persona profiles. Transform them into real people: 

• Give them a name and stock photo. 
• Construct their background, common behaviors, challenges, and goals based on the data patterns.

Many platforms help you quickly and effectively develop buyer personas. These include an empathy map. As a visual design tool, it includes basic information and deeper insights into what the persona thinks, feels, says, does, and hears. It also covers the pains and gains they experience. 

Here is a possible empathy map for Dr. Sarah Jensen:

The best personas align closely with real customer data and metrics rather than imagined or second-guessed details. Frequently review the actual information and tweak the personas when needed. 

   4. Get Stakeholder Feedback

Thriving SaaS businesses share one factor in common: they shift from a sales- to a revenue-driven mindset. Developing a buyer persona is a good strategy to do the same. 

Humanizing target segments through detailed personas helps departments stay grounded in solving real problems versus pushing products. It encourages them to develop features and messaging that convert and retain buyers.

Additionally, personas guide teams in developing a satisfying end-to-end experience for high-value customers rather than trying to attract everyone. Organizations also fine-tune pricing, sales interactions, and content strategy using deeper market insights. This enables more qualified leads, shorter sales cycles, and expanded deal sizes.

Adopting a revenue-driven mindset means getting stakeholder buy-ins even when developing the personas. Doing this also provides added marketing benefits. 

For one, the organization draws on diverse perspectives. Sales, marketing, product, engineering, and support teams have valuable, unique interactions with various customer segments. Collaborating gives a more complete picture.

Joint creation also prevents goal misalignment and fosters shared ownership. Everyone becomes accountable for the business’s growth (and failure). 

Here are some ways to encourage team collaboration when drafting buyer personas:

• Send the draft personas to colleagues in leadership, product, engineering, sales, marketing, and customer support. Ask for their honest feedback on how well the personas resonate. 
• Schedule a working session with stakeholders to walk through the persona details. Identify gaps between the personas and actual customer feedback and experiences.
• Incorporate the feedback into your personas. Modify details as needed so that they ring true across the organization. Stakeholders might suggest changes to the persona’s goals, challenges, behaviors, and preferences based on their unique interactions.
• Validate changes with customer data as you refine the personas. 
• Keep iterating. Use regular check-ins to update internal teams on how well the personas track.

   5. Design One-Page Persona Summaries  

The last step in creating a buyer persona is writing and publishing a summary. Physical documents make abstract concepts, such as market segments and user groups, more tangible and understandable.

They also serve as a quick reference tool during meetings, brainstorming sessions, and day-to-day decision making. In addition, integrating personas into the physical or digital workspace makes them a part of the daily workflow. They remind everyone to consider the customer in their work.

A typical buyer persona summary appears like this:

• The header contains the persona’s name and a catchy title such as “Dr. Sarah Jensen: The Healthcare Vanguard.”
• The demographics are in a sidebar or a small section near the top.
• The goals and challenges feature two side-by-side sections for comparison.
• The buyer’s journey and preferences are below goals and challenges or on the opposite side if you use a two-column layout.
• The persona’s quotes, influences, and objections are in smaller sections or callouts sprinkled throughout the page. Visual callouts feature important statistics or data points.
• Different font sizes, weights, and colors provide information hierarchy. The most important details should immediately stand out.
• Icons represent demographics, goals, pain points, etc. Graphics make the summary more engaging and quickly help convey information. 
• The color scheme matches your brand.
• White space effectively separates different sections and allows the reader’s eyes to rest.
• The footer contains contact information or the next steps for the team. 

Summing Up

Buyer personas take time to build, but the payoff is huge. They both guide and drive critical decisions, from messaging to brand values and positioning. They are one of the essential factors influencing conversion and retention.

The steps above provide the fundamental tips for developing rich, data-driven buyer personas. However, consider working with a reputable SaaS marketing agency to further customize the process to your needs, goals, and industry.

Digital Authority Partners (DAP) has helped many Fortune 5000 SaaS companies succeed. Our team has increased one business’s leads by 300% in two years. Contact us today to know how we can help you achieve higher retention and revenue growth, beginning with well-designed buyer personas.