Buyer personas

[ANaughton5]

I'm trying to do the buyer persona exercise, but at this stage my personas are strictly hypothetical. I don't have any real-life contacts. I'm inventing personas who I think are as close to real life as possible, so I can best design a marketing plan. The problem is, the exercise is asking for names, email addresses and phone numbers, which of course don't exist! 

[YoelBA-GDS]

1. Hi! I feel your frustration. In my experience, a Persona is a dynamic thing. You start with the most basic identifying characteristics of the potential customers you are aware of. You provide as much "flesh" as you can, but only based upon your experience to date.
   Then the fun begins:
2. Every marketing campaign you create should have the picture (profile) of the target audience (Persona) in front of them. Every marketing asset should attempt to enable the recipient/visitor/reader to identify with its contents.
3. Wherever possible, use A/B testing to tweak the content in order to test whether the details of the Persona are true or mistaken.
4. Then you analyze the actual results (engagement behavior) of your campaigns to learn which element of the marketing assets generated the greatest engagement. The conclusions from this analysis are then added to or modify the Persona.

We would do a Persona analysis once a month, depending upon the amount of new data collected. But the important thing is - a Persona is a dynamic description of the kind of person who is interested in what you are offering, and that you are interested in selling it to them!

Go forth and explore!

You might find this a source of inspiration for data points you should be looking for to "flesh out" that buyer profile (Persona).