Regardless of your industry, product or service, all great inbound marketing starts with one thing: knowing your target audience.
Without knowing who you’re targeting, it’s impossible to craft messaging that speaks to your audience, captures their attention or effectively answers their questions.
And while every inbound marketer knows the importance of creating buyer personas, very few talk about the power of negative buyer personas – which are an equally important part of your inbound marketing strategy.
To explain what a negative buyer persona is, it’s important to first understand what buyer personas are and how they help your business. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customers based on market research and real data about your existing customers. Creating buyer personas helps you identify your ideal customers so you can market to them more effectively.
Just as buyer personas help give you a better idea of who to target, exclusionary personas help you better understand who to shy away from in your messaging and strategy. And when you hand leads over to sales, having documented negative personas will help your sales team spot the signs of a potentially bad customer early on.
Furthermore, negative buyer personas help you:
The first step in creating negative buyer personas is to nail down your main personas. It may sound obvious, but you can’t accurately depict who you don’t want to target without a clear idea of who you do.
Once you have your buyer personas, the process for creating negative buyer personas is similar – but there are a few key differences.
Start by talking with your team. Sit down with people from all departments to ensure that everyone is on the same page and all opinions are heard. Additionally, each department within your organization brings something unique to the table, which will help you be more comprehensive as you outline customer pain points, goals and common behaviors.
Next, interview leads, customers and even former customers. In fact, former customers are a great place to start because it’ll help you understand why they left you and why they weren’t a good fit for your business.
Once you’ve conducted your buyer persona interviews, it’s time to start building your persona profile. Fill in the basics like demographics, background, sources of information, goals and challenges. Then, move on to what you don’t want. Think about past experiences with clients who weren’t a great fit for your company (and on your interviews), and ask yourself:
As you go through this list of questions, you’ll start to notice some trends among your not-so-ideal clients – and those attributes are what will make up your negative buyer personas.
Although creating negative personas takes time, effort and resources, having them is incredibly beneficial for your entire organization. As a marketer, negative personas not only give you a better idea of prospects that aren’t a good fit for your business, they also provide you with the insights you need to create better content for your ideal buyer – in turn, allowing you to understand your target audience even better.
Now that you know who you want to target (and don’t want to target), it’s time to start documenting these personas. To help you get started, we've created a Buyer Persona Template for you. Use this template, complete with samples already included, to finish fleshing out the targeted personas that will drive your marketing decisions!