How to Create a Buyer Persona- To Better Understand Your Customers

Are your marketing campaigns being ignored?

No matter how creative and appealing your marketing content is.

Writing for somebody you do not really know can be challenging. This is exactly why we need the buyer’s persona.

You have to be very clear with what you are offering and how it is going to help your audience.

If done correctly it can be a huge advantage for your business. According to research done by experts, they found if you send an email by using buyer persona, that will increase the open rate 2 to 5 times.

Now the valid question that arises is how do you create a buyer persona for your business.

As an experienced marketer you must be well prepared with all your homework done when it comes to your clients’ fundamental demographics, you must know what they do for a job, their age, and where they reside.

Don’t worry if you have not yet created any sort of buyer personas for your business yet. With this guide, you’ll be walked through all the steps and curves of how you can boost your business growth, just by creating a relevant buyer’s persona.

Related: How to Build a Strong Brand Image to Attract Your Ideal Customers

What Is A Buyer’s Persona?

The buyer persona is a representation of your ideal potential customer. Who will buy your product & services from you. It’s created based on the research & the pre-existing data of your customers. It consists the information about their life challenges, likes & dislikes, & other demographical information.

For instance, consider the example of this buyer’s persona that we’ve created for our business.

Robert has a team working under him. He is passionate, enthusiastic, and running a single business mainly. Robert is married and probably has few kids.

Roberts knows a little bit about digital marketing but we are not sure whether he understands the meaning of backlink/deindex/crawl.

This is a detail of our buyer persona in its raw form. When a company or a marketer creates a description that appears to describe a genuine buyer persona, they have done their homework with great expertise.

Now the question arises why you should actually be bothered with too much research just to create a buyer’s persona? The answer is simple: comprehensive buyer personas provide you with a well-defined target audience, give your faceless audience a face and help you frame a conversation within your marketing campaigns without any issue.

Why Buyer’s Persona Is Very Important?

For various teams in your company, a buyer persona can be quite beneficial.

Departments that interact directly with customers, be it marketing, sales, or customer service, can make great use of a comprehensive and elaborative buyer persona.

Literally, any team that handles customer acquisition and/or retention could do their job efficiently with buyer personas in hand.

Furthermore, there are other ways you can effectively make use of the buyer’s persona.

To Focus On The Customer’s Needs

Using buyer personas forces you to reframe your marketing tactics and ideas to focus more on the client’s requirements rather than on your own.

To Optimize Your Social Ad Targeting

Social media advertising includes a large spectrum of targeting possibilities that are very specific. Your buyer personas could perhaps be used to develop social advertisements that communicate specifically to the people you’ve identified in advance as your target audience. 

Related: What is Better: Google Ads vs Facebook Ads

Tailors Messaging to Prioritize leads

Your brand’s interaction with its appropriate audience is an essential component of each and every marketing campaign. For most businesses, inbound marketing can only be effective if the content is created takes into consideration the customer’s points of interest.

Related: Top 10 Methods to Get Business Leads Online

Steer in-House Communication and Corporate Expansion 

A buyer persona paves a way to polish up in-house communications and work on the gaps that may have occurred due to a varied understanding of both company’s vision and the customer’s viewpoint. 

To Set Apart From the Crowd

Your audience tends to understand your message in a much better way if they can relate to it instantly. When you take the time to learn about them through buyer personas.

Steps To Create A Buyers Persona

Step 1: Determine Your Target Audience

Start by doing a little research. Analyzing your audience can help you build a genuine audience, in addition to that, you also learn unique facts about your audience that you weren’t aware of beforehand.

You can consider your present customers as a reference and starting point for your research. Do you have a list of your finest and most loyal clients? Take time to analyze your present loyal customers and answer: Is there any pattern of similarity among these customers?

You can arrange an in-person interview or an on-call conversation with some of your dearest clients with whom you like doing business to gather insights about them. This practice enables you to ask follow-up questions to dig deeper into their thought process related to their prior responses.

You also need to exclude who is not your buyer persona. To understand which types of individuals are straight misfits for your product or services, you can also study clients with whom you have had an unpleasant encounter.

Furthermore, you can create an email survey and blow it to all your current subscribers and can get too many replies without much effort. But the question arises what question you must include in these email surveys? Let’s take a look at it.

When do you check your e-mails the most often?

What are your current struggles [Add your business info]?

Do you have any doubts [Insert your target industry here].

What type of content do you enjoy?

What format of content are you comfortable with the most?

Is there a certain type of content you’d want to see from me?

What are some of the issues you’re facing?

Buyer’s personas just like your services need constant maintenance thus make sure you update your personas every year or two based on such survey responses.

Step 2: Stick To Often Occurring Elements

Select a few of the most common responses you got from consumers, this will help to narrow down your choices to stick with while building your persona.

Your persona should include essential details that the majority of people deal with, such as the same problems, pain points, interests.

Here are some of the things you’ll need to get through with by the end of this step:

1. A look at the demographic numbers (age, occupation, etc.)
2. Behavioral patterns (skillset, expertise, interested fields, interest within your offerings, preferences, likes, dislikes, etc.)
3. Identifying your client’s pain areas and aspirations
4. Choices in the email (do they wish to be your subscriber, how frequently they wish to receive, how often they open their emails, etc.)

Step 3: Create Distinct Personas

It’s time to draft the buyer personas that you’ve pinned down the most common elements about them. In this very step, you are going to decide how many different personas you require based upon the categories of most reoccurring elements.

You can accomplish this by classifying people within your audience who have similar issues and aspirations, and then grouping them together and mark them as a different category. These categories are the decision ground of distinct identities of personas.

For example, if you are a dentist then you have clients who want to get dental fixes due to some disease, and others are just regular dental enhancement procedures, so you have to make two different personas for both of them. You can always go back and conduct extra research if you feel the need to.

Step 4: Name Your Personas

Naming your buyer persona is a great and effective method to create content for and tailor it accordingly. Putting a name on your persona helps you to compose emails as if you’re talking to a real person.

As a result, you will be able to create more customized content. To top it over you can add a face to this name as well.  Find a picture that best suits your buyer’s character and you are good to go. 

Step 5: Use Your Personas for Content

It’s time to start creating your emails and other content with the help of your buyer personas now which you have very dedicatedly named, faced with other important data. You want to make sure that all your in-house teams can have ready access to this data at any time.

Because you can generate more targeted and customized stuff for them, your audience will be more engaged with your content. Then you can help them overcome their challenges.

Related: Email Marketing- Budding Trends Busted!

Checklist To Create Buyer’s Persona

This checklist has all the necessary information that you need before you start collecting information.

In the beginning, the majority of marketers usually give their personas a name and fill in the further details.

Collect Customer Demographics Data

Buyer persona demographic information includes.

• Gender/Age 
• What is your audience’s current earning level? (including annual income)
• Geographical location 
• Relationship status 
• Education Qualification
• Skillset
• Family Status

Collect Customer Psychographics Data

These are the ideas, viewpoints, and ambitions of a persona. An essential component for the template, for customers, are actively expecting that businesses share the interests and values that they consider important, voice their opinions, and participate in discussions

1. Personal/professional objectives
2. Beliefs and morals

Related: Marketing Psychology: 25 Key Principles That Influence Customers Behavior

Professional Status

When it comes to this, both B2B and B2C firms must take note, since they often have to decide whether or not they are targeting management individuals or real consumers.

1. Job title and position description (manager, professional, specialist, etc.)
2. Niche/ Industry

Related: B2B Marketing Strategies That Guarantee Better Results

Pain Points And Challenges

Marketing and other teams should pay the greatest attention to this part. In order to design and deliver the best solution, a firm must understand the customer’s issues and hurdles.

1. What are their biggest challenges and pain points?
2. Obstacles in their path 
3. Unrealistic or realistic fears

Influences And Information Sources

Find out who your ideal consumer listens to, who they trust, and where they search for answers. This insight may be used to direct influencer endorsement, branding, PR, and ad and content placement strategies.

1. Blogs, social networks, and websites that they like using
2. Favorite social/media channels (digital and print)
3. Followed Influencers/thought leaders  (online or offline)
4. Event/ Gathering preferences

Purchasing Process

The last part must explain how the buyer persona makes purchasing decisions. This information will guide digital teams to identify trigger events and enhance the buyer’s journey and your sales.

1. Authority in the decision-making process
2. How often do they purchase the product or service?
3. What is preventing them from purchasing?

Beyond Buyer’s Persona

If you’re building personas, it’s also a good idea to go beyond the typical “buyer.”

For your consideration, here are some more identities I’ve created and utilized in various contexts.

Detractors– In addition to your main persona, In the purchasing cycle, detractors are the individuals who might potentially sabotage the transaction, even if your primary persona is in favor of it. This is pretty prominent in difficult B2B transactions with extensive sales cycles and various personnel involved.

Influencers– While influencers may not necessarily purchase the goods directly themselves, their influence on your target audience is so significant and essential that it is worth putting time into them.

Anti-personas– Your buyer’s persona’s polar opposite is an anti-persona. It is a made-up figure who symbolizes a group of people who are not your target consumers.

Simply put, developing an anti-persona does not mean that you would prevent these people from purchasing your product or service; it just means that you will not invest your time and efforts in attracting these people.

Popular Buyer Persona Examples

The Marketing Manager Persona

This persona has been created by Behance & has all important details like his motivations, challenges, which technologies he loves to use. This descriptive persona helped Behance to make informed decisions for their marketing campaigns.

Healthcare Persona Example

In this persona, the healthcare business is targeting their potential customers very specifically. You can see this in the image “How we help” section.

This section talks about the challenges faced by the persona. This will help the business to run its marketing campaigns in an effective way by addressing individual challenges.

Millennial Molly Persona

This persona is created by Fresh food delivery service, they figured out that molly wants to stay healthy by eating fresh organic food. But due to lack of time, she can’t spend time researching it & cooking for herself.

So as a food service business they help Molly to achieve their goal by their services

Conclusion

Phew! That has been a great journey, I am pretty sure you are now well aware of what a buyer’s persona is, why you really need them, how you make them, and every little detail around these questions. 

It’s easier to reach out to your customers when you know who they are, what they’re thinking, and what difficulties they face. Interact with your audience as well as your team.