Developing a Buyer Persona
If you’re in business or marketing, you most likely have come across the term “ Buyer Persona”, often called a customer or marketing persona.
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is like your imaginary friend, except it’s an in-depth fictional character that represents your ideal, target customer. The more detail your character has, the better you’ll be able to capture your target customer when you begin to market your product and/or service.
The buyer persona helps a business and its employees (if you have them) have a deeper understanding of their customers. Ultimately it defines where you are going to find your target customer, how and why your product will fulfil their needs and how they make decisions.
For many businesses, it’s common to have multiple buyer personas - each with a different criteria when it comes to your product or service.
I’m a small business owner, do I really need to do this?
Yes! Absolutely. Buyers tend to gravitate to a product or service that comes from a business they know and trust. Trust is built when a buyer believes that the business truly understands them, and can provide a quality solution to their problem.
By creating your Buyer Persona’s you’ll have gained a detailed overview of your target audience. You’ll use this information to tailor your marketing campaigns to encourage your target customer to buy what you have to offer.
How do I create a Buyer Persona?
This is where the magic happens (we love this part, and you will too!) and it’s all about questions, research and details.
You’re going to complete a thorough analysis of your ideal customer, by answering a whole load of questions;
Age
Where do they live
Language/s
Spending power and patterns
Interests and hobbies
Challenges they face
Stage of life (single, children, retired)
For B2B: The size of businesses and who makes purchasing decisions
It’s also a good idea to make sure you understand which social channels your audience uses.
Identify your customer goals and what problem they are trying to solve.
Place yourself in your customers boots, and ask yourself; What is their end game? What are they looking for when they come to my business?
The other side of this question is what problem or issue is your potential customer trying to solve? What barriers could they face when trying to successfully solve their problem?
If you’re already in business, you have direct access to learn why customers love your products, or which parts of the customer experience are just not working.
Define how you can help your customers
Think about both the features and benefits of your product/service and how it can make your customers' lives better or easier.
As you come to the end of your research, you’ll have characteristics that you can group together to create a detailed, specific description of a buyer person (which will resemble a real life person)
Take a look at our example below:
