If you run a business, you are probably looking for the right customers. Simply put, a buyer persona is the description of your ideal customer. This includes their demographics, personal interests, beliefs, and lifestyle, as well as where, when, and why they buy your products, and how they use them.
In the digital marketing world, every detail about your potential customer is important. If you are targeting the wrong people, you are just wasting your efforts. That is the reason why you need to create a buyer persona when carrying out a marketing campaign.
What is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a detailed representation of a target customer for a company or organization.
Buyer persona development helps organizations establish a deep understanding of their target customer so they can define their inbound marketing strategy and initiatives.
The buyer persona usually includes information such as demographic and psychographic data, lifestyle, customer goals and motivations. Buyer personas provide insight into the customer’s journey, which can then be used to inform marketing strategies, product development, and sales conversations.
HubSpot defines a buyer persona as a semi-fictional representation of an ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.
By understanding who their ideal customers are, companies can make more informed decisions about how to meet their needs, from product design and pricing to content and communications.
Key Takeaways
Buyer persona refers to the combination of the characteristics that would describe an ideal customer for your business.
When creating a buyer persona, you can use existing data about your customers or put yourself in their shoes to imagine your ideal customer.
Negative buyer persona subsumes characteristics that are opposite to those that make buyer persona.
The key benefit of having a buyer persona is defining your target audience more precisely.
Defining Buyer Persona
A buyer persona can be defined as a mix of various aspects of a customer’s demographic, psychographic, and behavioral characteristics. Let’s take a look at a few tips to keep in mind when creating your buyer persona.
Why is a Buyer Persona Important?
A buyer persona is an important tool for any business looking to better understand and market to their ideal customer.
Buyer personas provide a detailed profile of the customer and their needs, which helps businesses to tailor their inbound marketing campaigns, products, and services to the customer’s individual needs.
The traits of the buyer persona can also be used to analyze the customer experience, identify new growth opportunities, and inform future marketing strategies.
Last but not least, buyer personas can help businesses better understand how their customers think and feel, allowing them to adjust their messaging and product offerings accordingly.
How to Create a Buyer Persona?
First, you will need to collect and analyze the data about your current customers. If you own a website, your customers have already provided you with demographics and contact information before making their first purchase.
In case you run a retail store with no online buying options, you can provide free membership cards for each new customer. In return, you will have their name, age, gender, location, and email address – all of which you can use to track what they buy at your store.
Moreover, if you want to know some specific opinions and habits of your buyers, consider sending them a short survey via email to complete in exchange for a coupon. You can also conduct interviews through phone calls if they are comfortable with that. This is harder than sending them emails, but it will provide you with more valuable insights.
What Are The Best Strategies to Create a Buyer Persona?
A good place to start is to Imagine that you are the customer. How would you best describe yourself? Why would you want to buy your product and how would you use it?
Here is a list of questions that will help you construct a buyer persona from scratch:
- What are your age, gender, and income?
- What does your product have that other products in the same category do not?
- Are you ready to pay for a high-quality product that is worth the price? Or, would you opt for a cheaper option of less quality?
- Do you prefer buying online or in a retail store?
- What is the exact need that propels you to buy your product?
Buyer Persona Creation
Once you gather all the customer data and survey results, you have to sort them out somehow. You can do this by using a free buyer persona template online (e.g. Hubspot’s template)
After you put all your research data in place, you have to look for as many patterns as you can. There is no correct way to do this. Still, you can categorize your customers based on demographics and start looking for patterns from there.
Here is one example: Do men aged between 35 and 45 tend to buy more of your product than men under 35? If so, why? Do they have similar incomes? Do they live in the same city/state? From here, you would analyze other characteristics such as hobbies and personal interests, or any other matching details among them. As you slowly recognize and mark these commonalities, you will ultimately create your ideal customer.
Nonetheless, do not forget that molding your ideal customer is never a definite task. A buyer persona is something that is subject to change every time you update the information about your customers. How often you will update your buyer persona is entirely up to you.
How Many Buyer Personas Should You Create?
It depends. If you are a small business just starting out, then one buyer persona is sufficient for your needs. As your business grows, you will probably expand the variety of products or services that you have to offer.
At this point, you should consider creating more than one buyer persona as this will give you more marketing options. You will be able to create different campaigns tailored to different types of your customers. After all, different people may want to buy your products for different purposes. Your goal is to make sure your business can give solutions to all their needs.
What is a negative buyer persona?
When creating your target audience, it is important to know which people to avoid. A negative buyer persona is the amalgamation of all the characteristics that do NOT describe your ideal customer. Creating a negative persona will help you fine-tune your buyer persona and give you clearer outlines of what type of customers you aim to attract.
How to Use Buyer Personas?
When you get to know who your ideal customer is, you can benefit from it in two major ways:
Adjust your inbound marketing strategies
Knowing your buyer persona’s online habits will enable you to place ads where the right audience will see them. It will also help you create more personalized email campaigns. In this way, your emails will not appear as spam messages to users. Once again, when you know WHO your potential customers are, you can give them what they need.
Content audit
It is easier to say what you exactly mean when you know who your listener is. The same applies to your content, be it a website, social media, or email. Your content readers are your interlocutors. Use their language, refer to popular trends, be informal, and interact with them on a personal level. Do a content audit so you can get the meaning across to your potential customers while not appearing as a stranger to them.
In a nutshell, having a buyer persona is a huge improvement for every aspect of your marketing. Also, do not forget to define the negative persona for your business. This is sometimes even more valuable than your buyer persona.
Now You Know What a Buyer Persona is!
Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers. It’s a tool that will help you tailor your marketing messages and offers to your target audience. There are many strategies that you can use to get more customer data and create an accurate buyer persona for your business.
You’ve learned what a buyer persona is, why it is important, and strategies for buyer persona creation. With all this knowledge and information, it’s up to you now to determine if creating a buyer persona is the business approach you need to take for your company or organization.
Buyer Persona FAQs
There are many ways in which a buyer persona can be useful. One popular tactic is to get your sales team up to date with the persona. Once the sales team has a better understanding of the typical buyer, they can be more effective at sales.
There are key characteristics that you may wish to focus on when creating a buyer persona. Using a prebuilt template can give you a good idea of the best elements to include in your persona.
A good buyer persona enables businesses to adapt their marketing strategy to the characteristics of their customers. Moreover, it enhances the entire marketing plan by making good use of customer data.
Just like the traditional buyer persona, the B2B buyer persona creates an image of the ideal customer. The main difference is that the B2B persona focuses on other businesses that may be good customers or partners for your own company.
