Chasing trends and buying ads that don’t make sense for your audience is a quick way to burn precious resources. Your unique selling propositions must align with your audience.
The best way to do so is with a buyer persona template. This lets you consistently reach the right audience with the right content. Question now is, how do you make one?
What is a Buyer Persona Template?
Instead of pitching products to just anybody, you put your products in front of the people who get the most value out of them. A buyer persona template uses data to help you find these people.
You don’t have to do any guesswork. Templates should be research-backed or created using data from CRM tools, previous customer data, or your organization’s sales trends.
When you fill out your buyer persona template, you get to map out crucial information like demographics, goals, pain points, or job descriptions. This makes each interaction tailor-made.
Some businesses can have one buyer persona or multiple depending on the size and the complexity of your sales process. If you’re just starting, creating just one persona is fine.
But it's important to note that a buyer persona isn’t the same as your target audience. A persona is a representation of an actual individual. Your target audience is a broad generalization.
Buyer Persona vs Target Audience
Buyer personas are specific. Think of a specific definition, character, details, hobbies, or even work ethic. Target audiences don’t give you these specific details. Here are some examples:
Buyer Persona: John Doe, a post-graduate in digital marketing looking to grow his brand. He’s looking to get his first clients but doesn’t know how to start.
Target Audience: Marketing freelancers working with big companies. Gets an annual salary ranging from $50,000 to $90,000. Between 25 to 45 years old.
Let's say you’re doing cold emails. If you’re working with your target audience, email copy would be generic. But, a buyer persona template lets you make tailored, more personalized emails.
How To Make a Buyer Persona Template
Buyer persona templates are placeholders for your ideal customers. To create your templates, you need to learn your customers’:
Needs
The first thing you need to learn is if customer needs align with your offering. Look at your existing customer base. What’s the common denominator?
Going through your CRM and analyzing customers helps you segment based on needs or behaviors. You can even create different buyer persona templates, each with different needs.
For example, Instantly CRM lets you have a holistic view of each of your prospects and customers, which can help you create a more detailed buyer persona template.
Value Drivers
What do your customers value most? Is it the affordability of a product? How it can increase productivity? How can it handle complex tasks? Or how it can automate repetitive workloads?
For example, John Doe, our postgraduate digital marketer is still looking for his first clients. He might value the affordability of a product instead of its capability of handling complex tasks.
Demographic
Understanding what demographic your customers are in helps you choose the best sales methodology and approach. Are they decision-makers? If not, can they champion your product?
Learning demographics like job positions or roles also helps you position your product or service as tools to help them reach their goals or overcome challenges.
Goals
Your customer's goals should align with their needs, value drivers, and demographics. Let’s use Jane Doe as an example. She’s the department head at a recruitment agency.
Unfortunately, her team always feels burned out after hours of manual data entry tasks. Her goal is to have a more productive and efficient workflow.
Challenges
Pain points or challenges are the things that prevent your customers from achieving their goals. Challenges can also be what they’re most frustrated about. In our previous example with Jane Doe, her frustrations come from the repetitive manual data entry tasks that cause burnout.
Don’t waste time engaging with prospects whose challenges you can’t solve. They won’t likely buy your product or service. Instead, you’ll end up wasting time and resources doing follow-ups.
Buying Cycles
Is your prospect a decision-maker? If not, who would they need to get approval for a purchase? What does that process look like? Do they need to get approval from a board of directions?
How long does it usually take for them to decide on a purchase? You don’t want to spend too much time nurturing prospects.
Technologies
Different buyer personas should have different technologies on their tech stack. What tools and technologies are used to help solve pain points, run daily operations, and achieve goals?
You could position your products as the better alternative or as a compliment to the other tools they’re using. Let’s say you’re selling an SEO tool.
Your buyer persona could include somebody who also uses tools like Google Analytics, WordPress, or Semrush. Unique selling propositions could include lower costs or a more automated workflow.
Buyer Persona Template
Now that we know the fundamentals of making a buyer persona template, let's see some examples in action. Buyer persona templates are a placeholder, each one should have a name attached, their needs, value drivers, demographics, goals, and challenges.
Maria Smith, Sales Representative
“Maria is a sales representative for a financial services company. She needs a CRM system to manage leads, track customer interactions, and close deals faster."
- Name: Maria Rodriguez
- Job Title: Sales Representative
- Industry: Financial Services
- Location: New York City
- Decision Maker: No (needs approval from the sales manager)
- Needs: To organize customer information, automate follow-ups, and get insights into sales performance
- Value Drivers: Increased productivity, improved lead conversion rates, and better customer relationships
- Goals: Close more deals, shorten sales cycles, and exceed quota
- Challenges: Currently using spreadsheets and manual notes, leading to disorganization and missed opportunities
- Buying Cycles: Involves a demo and trial period. Needs to show how the CRM will directly impact sales numbers to get approval
- Technologies: Microsoft Office Suite, company intranet
Remember to be specific with the information of your buyer personas. The more in-depth it is, the more impactful it becomes in whatever part of the sales process you use it for.
Best Way To Use Buyer Persona Templates
Buyer persona templates have multiple use cases for both sales and marketing teams. Here are some of the most popular ones you can use today:
Lead Generation
With a buyer persona template, you’ll know exactly who to look for when doing lead generation. You already know the technologies and the demographics. All that’s left now is to use lead generation tools like Instantly B2B Lead Finder to find the exact match.
With B2B Lead Finder, you can look for leads in specific demographics, industries, or job positions. Let’s say you’re selling a more premium service or product. You can use the advanced filters to search based on revenue or company size.
Cold Email Marketing
Writing personalized cold emails using a buyer persona template is almost like cheating. You’d have everything you need to create copy that fully resonates with any prospect.
Let’s use Maria Smith as an example. She needs a CRM system to manage leads, track customer interactions, and close deals faster.
You can even use the data from the buyer persona profile and have AI automate the process of copywriting. Using Instantly’s AI prompts, we can input the data from the buyer persona profile and it can create copy for us. Here’s an example of what that can look like:
Subject line: We hate spreadsheets too.
Hi Maria,
Juggling spreadsheets and manual notes in sales is tough. Instantly CRM is a low-cost solution built for cold email marketing, offering unlimited seats for your whole team.
We help you:
Organize customer information
Automate follow-ups
Gain sales performance insights
Focus on building relationships and closing deals, not managing spreadsheets.
I’d love to give a quick demo to show you the impact on your sales numbers.
Best,
{{your name}}
Content Creation
Sales and marketing revolve around content. You want to tailor content to your exact target audiences and buyer persona templates do just that.
Let’s say you want to create content for Maria, a sales rep. You can curate content related to Microsoft Office Suite alternatives, lead management automation tips, or conversion rate strategies.
Improving Customer Relationships
Buyer personas give you clear, data-driven insights into the needs and preferences of your target audience. You can create better content, offer faster support, and build customer relationships that drive loyalty.
Understanding and meeting the needs of each buyer persona leads to increased satisfaction, customers feel heard, and they feel valued when unique needs and preferences are met.
Integrating Buyer Personas Into Cold Email Marketing
Taking the time to create buyer personas helps you create well-rounded cold email marketing campaigns. Here’s how you can integrate buyer personas into your cold email strategy.
List Building and Segmentation
Cold email campaigns relying on “spray and pray” don’t get results. Be specific starting from list building and segmentation using your buyer persona templates.
Instantly B2B Lead Finder gives you a massive headstart. You can look for specific leads that fit your buyer personas and create segmented campaigns for each.
Let’s say you’re selling lead generation services to contractors. There are several types of contractors ranging from HVAC to roof repair. Each can be segmented into different campaigns.
Each segment has its pain points, unique value propositions, and elements to A/B test. This lets you create hyper-personalized cold emails at scale.
Personalization at Scale
Personalized cold emails have higher reply rates. But you can’t personalize each email manually or it’ll take up your entire day. You need tools to automate this process.
Generic personalization often ends up in spam. Buyer personas help you get specific with your email copy. Here’s an example of a generic email copy using basic prompts on ChatGPT.
This time, we’ll use a buyer persona to create a cold email template:
Here’s the output:
You can connect your ChatGPT API Key with Instantly to automate this process and use personalization for leads that fit your buyer persona.
Go to your Instantly Dashboard. Click the AI Prompts icon and create your cold email templates using the buyer persona you created. There are dozens of community templates you can get inspiration from if you don’t know where to start.
Transform Buyer Personas Into Lead Data Using Instantly CRM
Buyer personas aren’t real people. They’re placeholders. If you want to get real specific, the next best step is to leverage lead data from CRMs built for cold email marketing.
With Instantly CRM, sales reps have a holistic view of each lead from their competitors, customer profiles, and the pain points they face.
Reps have every detail they need to give contextual personalization to each correspondence. Reps also have the option to send an email, call, or send an SMS right on the CRM.
The best part is you only need one subscription for your entire team. There’s no need to pay for extra seats allowing you to scale sustainably.
Key Takeaways
A buyer persona template helps sales and marketing align messaging and unique selling propositions to the prospect's needs. It can be used in lead generation, cold outreach, content creation, and improving customer relationships.
To create your buyer persona template, you must identify the following:
- Needs: Does your offer align with the prospect's needs?
- Value drivers: What are the things that prospects care about most?
- Demographics: What is the job position, industry, or location of your prospect?
- Goals: What is your prospect trying to achieve personally or professionally?
- Challenges: What are the pain points that prevent prospects from achieving goals?
- Buying Cycle: What does the process look like when purchasing products or services?
- Technologies: What are the tools being used by your prospect to do daily tasks?
If you want to leverage buyer personas to improve cold outreach, Instantly.ai is the best tool for the job. Try Instantly today and start creating cold emails that resonate with each persona.