A buyer persona is a semi-fabricated depiction of your ideal customers, based on factual research and data about your present customers. Buyer personas are catalysts that aid businesses in recognizing and understanding their target audience’s behaviors, needs, and blemishes.
Therefore, as a marketer, are you looking for ways to create a perfect buyer persona and understand your target market better? Or do you want to tailor your marketing strategies to engage and convert your target audience?
In this blog, we’ve organized in detail the step-by-step process you must understand while creating a buyer persona including proven buyer persona templates. Keep Reading!
What Is Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a properly organized and detailed speculative profile that helps businesses to be aware of and relate better to their potential customers. It fosters your marketing strategies and connection with your target audience.
It is not just limited to basic statistics. Buyer personas also investigate a business’s intended audience’s challenges, needs, and behaviors. By making a comprehensive persona of potential customers, businesses can adapt product development and marketing content to meet the preferences and needs of various customer groups, improving the chances of converting leads into customers.
Why Do I Need A Buyer Persona For My Business?
Some key advantages of creating a buyer persona are below:
- Recognize Your Ideal Customer: A buyer persona helps you grasp your perfect customer’s wants, needs, and drive. These assist in creating products, goods, and services that connect with them.
- Design A Target Audience: You can figure out your target audience’s characters, demographics, and areas of need, and adapt your marketing attempts to reach and connect with them.
- Have A Better Business Strategy: Knowing your target audience and ideal customer can help create more functional marketing campaigns and content marketing strategies likely to convert leads into consumers
- Boost Customer Experience: Your customer’s overall experience with your business is well-improved when you have a buyer persona that helps you understand your customer’s frustrations and needs.
In summary, creating a buyer persona for your business is important to building a lucrative business strategy. It helps you give more to existing customers, understand the market, secure your target audience, and have functional marketing strategies to make profits.
Steps To Create A Buyer Persona
Satisfied customers, effective and working marketing strategies, and a happy sales department? How does that sound? Thus, the thought on how to create a buyer persona.
Here is a step-by-step model on how to create a buyer persona.
1. Research And Collection Of Customer Data
One key process to creating a buyer persona is realizing your eventual customers’ needs and frustration. This way, you know who you should target, which factors propel their decision-making process, and how to ensure your
messaging and marketing efforts thrive. The first step in identifying customer goals and frustrations is to collect data.
You can make buyer personas using research, surveys, and interviews — coupled with a mix of customers, prospects, and those outside your contacts database who might align with your target audience.
Start by making use of existing data personal to your company. Then contact your sales team and customer support team. The team deals with customers daily, so they may have some helpful insights. Get info from your current customer database, website log, and social media insights. Study and analyze customer feedback and support requests to identify recurring themes and pain points. Try to figure out patterns and harmony among your existing customer substructures.
Social media is also a powerful tool to use in your research and collection of data. Explore insights by conducting social listening on social media. Social listening involves monitoring and analyzing social media conversations, references, and sentiments about a brand, or product. It helps acknowledge
how your brand is perceived online and gain insights into customer preferences, needs, and frustration.
Furthermore, having used up your internal resources, you should conduct market research with real people. This is the next step! Surveys, interviews, and physical focus groups can provide valuable visions into how members of your target audience operate. Ask questions about your customer’s preferences, issues, goals, and buying behaviors. Do your target buyers share the same job title? Do they own a home? You can ask specific questions to learn more about your customers.
Once you’ve experienced the research process, you’ll have much raw data about your potential and existing customers. But what do you do with all the information you’ve gathered? The next process is to use your research to point out patterns and recurrences from the answers to your interview questions, create at least one primary persona, and share that persona with the rest of the company.
2. Divide Your Client Base
Classifying your customer base into different divisions is another step to creating a buyer persona. Based on shared attributes, behaviors, and needs, these divisions will be the foundation for your buyer personas. There are known ways to classify your client base, they include:
- Demographic aspects: Gender, age, income, and situation
- Behavioral aspects: Preferences, frustrations, buying habits
- Psychographic aspects: Interests, lifestyle, values
Dividing your client base is the start. You should also emphasize the more important divisions for your business and marketing efforts. Tag each segment with a name that reflects the shared characteristics and needs of the group.
Moreover, you should write a short description of each segment that encapsulates their key traits and behaviors. These will be the foundation for creating detailed buyer personas for each segment.
3. Create A Comprehensive Buyer Persona
Moving on, each division of your buyer persona needs to be as detailed as possible. Add a name, age, and face (try using a stock image), to your buyer persona to make them more relatable. Gather and include the following information:
Demographic data: This includes normal information like age, gender, location, income, education, and job title. This information serves as the foundation for understanding who the persona is.
Aims and objectives: What are your persona’s individual or professional aims? How can the services you offer help them achieve these goals?
Psychographic information: This includes, interests, hobbies, values, and lifestyle choices that influence this persona’s decisions. Knowing a persona’s values and beliefs helps to create a more relevant message.
Challenges and frustrations: What issues or barricades does your persona currently face? Figuring out common pain points is an effective way to position your company’s offerings as a solution to their specific problems.
Buying journey: You should also identify and draw out the stages your persona goes through before they make purchases. Consider how a person would become aware of their problem or need, what considerations they take when researching different options, and how they finally decide what to buy.
Quotes or narratives: You can also include quotes and narratives from your market research or physical interviews with real customers to make the persona more relatable and memorable.
Behavioral characteristics: What are this customer’s behaviors? This includes information related to their buying patterns, preferred communication channels (e.g., email newsletters or specific social media platforms), and information sources.
After gathering the above, note that constantly refining your personas is key. Stability is not guaranteed, because your target audience can change over time, thus, consistent updates are required.
You can achieve this by sharing your personas with your team for feedback. The images below represent a comprehensive buyer persona:
4. Use Your Customer Personas
You’ve identified your user personas and know their purchasing decisions, motivations, and more. You’ve also deduced how your services or products can help. Then, it’s time to use your buyer personas in your marketing and product development processes.
In achieving this, one can develop marketing materials created to meet the specific needs and preferences of the personas.
In addition, use insights from your buyer personas to realize which improvements or attributes to add to your products. You can also introduce custom-made products or customizable service options to satisfy different persona preferences. Particularly, consider creating new products or services to address the unmet needs of your personas.
Buyer Persona Template
The information below is a template for a comprehensive buyer persona. You can use it as a model to create yours and fill in the relevant details.
- Name: Eric Lancaster
- Age: 31
- Location: New York City
- Language: English
- Level of education: Bachelor’s degree
- Occupation: Product manager
- Average income: $70,000
- Relationship status: Engaged
- Most used social media platforms: LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook
- Favorite brands: Samsung, Nike, Patagonia
- Customer needs: Eric needs high-quality, stylish, and eco-conscious products. He’s willing to pay a premium for a product that aligns with his values and makes him feel great about his purchase.
- Biggest customer frustration: Eric is busy and seldom shops, because of time. He often feels overwhelmed by the options available online. He wants to make informed and responsible buying decisions but doesn’t have the time to research everything he buys.
- Typical online behavior: Eric is active on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. He likes to stay informed about industry trends, link with other professionals, and learn about new products and services. He spends most of her free time browsing products and reading reviews before purchasing.
- Eric is an environmentally conscious consumer looking for top-quality and stylish products. The value offering is the convenience and ease of discovering sustainable products while also providing trust that the products are ethically made and environmentally friendly.
Buyer Persona Examples
Let’s see some examples of completed buyer personas, to understand better what they look like.
B2B (Business-To-Business) Buyer Persona
The image below is a B2B buyer persona for someone who works in HR. The persona clearly shows the target customer’s struggles and how the business can best meet those needs. In this case, HR recruiting tools smoothen processes, make recruiting easier, and ensure the HR expertly manages their overall job duties.
B2C (Buyer-to-Consumer) Buyer Persona
Based on the persona below, a streaming service would want to ensure that it has a user-friendly mobile app, sends new music notifications, and makes it seamless for users to find new music related to their interests and share content with friends.
Conclusion
The pros of creating a buyer persona can’t be overemphasized. A buyer persona for your business allows you to know and connect better with your target audience, fashion your marketing efforts and services to their needs, improve the overall customer experience and satisfaction, and make more informed strategic decisions.
Putting your customers at the heart of everything you do, you can guarantee your business’s progress and firm standing. Therefore, place value on creating buyer personas.
I’m Armand Manibo, an expert in influencer marketing with years of valuable experience. Through my work, I’ve partnered with hundreds of prestigious brands and thousands of influencers worldwide, generating over $500,000 in revenue for businesses. With a successful track record in influencer campaigns, I am proud to bring a wealth of insights.
