How To Create A Buyer Persona?

Have you been hearing a lot about creating a buyer persona for your business and are wondering how to go about it?

While you might not be familiar with the term, creating buyer personas is crucial to setting up a successful business.

Why?

Because buyer personas represent the description of your ideal customers, the ones who will be ready to buy your products or pay for your services. For instance, if you own a beauty salon providing high-end services, your buyer persona could be affluent women between 30 and 65 living in your area who love to look after themselves.

The more you know about your ideal customer, the better you’ll be able to target the relevant audience when advertising your offering and increase your conversions.

Besides, buyer personas will help you align your offer with your customers’ needs and adapt your communications, and are essential to any business plan or marketing plan.

So, now that we’ve established the importance of creating buyer personas for your business, here’s how to do it!

Creating A Customer Persona

Thoroughly Research Your Audience

If you want to know who your ideal customers are, you need to dig deep.

Some of the key data points you need to know to define your different buyer personas include:

• Location
• Age
• Spending power
• Spending habits
• Interests
• Social channels they use

To gather this precious information, you can use Google Analytics and glean data from your existing customer database, add lead magnet forms on your website to capture information about your qualified leads, and look at who the competition is targeting. You can also use free tools such as Google Trends or Facebook's Audience Insights.

Define Your Ideal Customers’ Pain Points

Knowing what challenges your customers are facing and understanding their pain points will allow you to perfectly tailor your offering and communications to cater to their needs.

You need to know what problems your audience is experiencing and the barriers they’re facing to achieve their goals.

This type of information can take time to gather, but once you’re clear on it, your marketing strategy will be much more powerful.

Social listening is one of the best ways to understand your audience’s pain points and identify their needs and goals.

To compile actionable insights, ask your sales team, scour relevant Facebook groups and forums, read competitors’ reviews, and use social listening tools such as Hootsuite Insights, ReviewTrackers, or Hubspot.

Create Your Buyer Personas

Now that you’ve collected precious insights about your ideal customers, time to put it all together and create customer profiles. Review the information you have and group characteristics and common patterns together to draft specific buyer personas.

For instance, you might identify a core customer group as women in their 30s who live in urban areas, have successful careers, and don’t have any children.

In that case, your buyer person could be “High Achiever Victoria.”

• She’s 32 years old.
• She lives in Sydney.
• She owns a marketing agency and is passionate about what she does.
• She loves going on international holidays with her partner once a year, spending time in high-end boutique hotels, and going to gourmet restaurants.
• She owns a Mercedes and a three-bedroom apartment in the northern beaches.
• She goes to Pilates three times a week and meets up with her girlfriends for dinner every Friday night.

Now, a buyer persona isn’t a list of characteristics. It’s more about the specific details that will allow you to think about your customers as human beings, helping you understand their behaviour and anticipating their needs.

Here are a few questions you need to answer when crafting your buyer personas:

• How old is your ideal customer?
• What’s their job title?
• Where do they live?
• What do they like to do?
• What are their main goals in life, both professionally and personally?
• What challenges are they facing?

Once done, assign a name and a photo to your customer persona, this will help you easily identify who your customer is and makes a fun way to talk about your customers in the office! 

If you have more than one customer persona, that's completely fine too - just assign a new name and photo to each one, and categorise them in order of priority (e.g. primary, secondary etc) or according to which product / service they would be associated with.

Understanding your buyer persona will help you flesh out your 4 Ps in your marketing plan, and understand the best ways to solve the problems your customers are facing with your product or service.

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