A buyer persona is a profile that represents your ideal Manufacturing customer. Basically, you’re giving a ‘face’ to a collection of data. By creating your own buyer personas for Manufacturing, you'll gain the ability to tailor your marketing efforts and better connect with your target audience. Buyer personas usually account for over 90% of a company’s sales.

Where to Start

For a simple start, follow these steps when creating a manufacturing buyer persona for Inbound Marketing:

• Look through your current contacts and pick out trends on how certain leads and customers find and ‘consume’ your data
• Ask your sales team for feedback from when they’ve interacted with leads
• If the resources are available, interview customers and prospects

You want to have about 2-3 specific personas to get started. If you’re a HubSpot customer, that’s even better! Just follow persona generator to putting your new manufacturing persona right into your marketing platform.

Demographics

Let's start off simple. Who is this person?

• Assign a unique name to this persona, i.e Procurement Manager Paul or Engineer Ed
• How old are they? Are you dealing with a millennial or a baby boomer?
• What is their highest level of education? Have they earned a Masters or just a High School Diploma?

Company

• Industry they work in?
• How many employees are in their organization?

Their Job Position

• What is their job role & title?
• How is their job measured? Do they need increase lead generation? Increase sales?
• Who do they report to? 

Job Characteristics

• What are they responsible for on a day to day basis?
• What are their biggest challenges?

Potential Software of Resources Used

• How do they communicate to clients and coworkers? Do they prefer to use the telephone?
• Do they use a specific type of software? CMS? CRM?

Where Do They Get Their Information

• Where does your persona go to get their information? Are they looking on social media? Are they doing internet searches?

Finished Persona

When you have filled out the information your persona should align with your ideal customer. You can adjust this when you find out more information.

Align Your Sales Team & Marketing Team

In order to epitomize what your personas are concerned about, be sure to include some real quotes from the interviews. Your sales team is going to want to know who they are; what they’re concerned about; and what they need. This is critical, so your sales team knows how to best address those concerns during their conversations with prospects.

By sharing this information you can help can help align your marketing and sales team by sharing the information. This provides them with an in-depth understanding of the type of person/people they are targeting. If you notice this persona spends a lot of their time on LinkedIn, push out relevant blogs. If they are getting their information through Google, optimize and update your on page SEO. By understanding who you are selling to you have a higher chance of increasing your leads.