What Is a Buyer Persona?
A practical guide to create a buyer persona for your business
How can you provide the best service to your customers? When can you get ahead of the competition?
The answer to these and related questions depends on one factor: knowing your customers.
In this lesson, we want to use the buyer persona to multiply your marketing effectiveness and avoid wasting your valuable resources.
Outline of this lesson:
- What is a buyer persona?
- Why should we have a buyer persona?
- What information do we need to create a buyer persona?
- How should we create a buyer persona for our business?
- Real example of a buyer persona.
1) What is a buyer persona?
Everything in marketing revolves around one thing, the customer. How well we know about our customers and their needs can be our trump card over our competitors in the market.
One of the best ways to know customers more accurately after market segmentation and selecting the most appropriate segment is using the buyer persona (we talked about the market segmentation and the technique of choosing the best market segment in the previous video. If you do not see it, I suggest you watch it here).
A buyer persona is, in fact, a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer that can be achieved in different ways. In other words, this semi-fictional image represents a group of your audience who have shared common interests, fears and needs.
Why different methods?
Because if you are a startup or an established company, there are several ways to build a buyer persona. We will discuss these methods in the following section.
If you have never encountered this term, I must tell you that marketers refer to their business’s ideal customer as a buyer persona.
Everything in marketing revolves around one thing, the customer.
2) Why should we have a buyer persona?
If you are a startup that wants to launch a new product:
- How do you identify the most critical features of this product?
- How and where do you find your target customers?
If you are an established business, how do you develop your new products? And which features do you add or subtract?
The reasons mentioned above are just a few of the most important reasons for developing a buyer persona for different businesses. In fact, without knowing who our ideal customer is and what their needs and concerns are, how can we offer a product or service that meets their needs?
How can we run successful advertising campaigns without knowing what networks and media they use or what magazines and books they read?
Without knowing their motivations or fears, how can we create a marketing message not lost in the mass of advertising messages?
Let’s take a closer look at the reasons businesses need buyer persona:
Your marketing activities are divided into two general categories:
- Inbound marketing
- Outbound marketing
Inbound marketing, which has received a lot of attention from marketers in recent years, is any marketing activity to produce relevant and useful content for the target audience and community. In fact, in this way, customers use search engines, social networks and other methods to access our content and get to know us.
In this marketing method, how can we produce content that benefits our audience when we do not know them?
The opposite is outbound marketing, where you try to reach your audience by using ads.
Question: How can we write the right business message without knowing the audience?
As you can see, the buyer persona is not only a useful tool in the hands of business owners and marketers, but in today’s world, it is an essential tool.
3) What information do we need to make the buyer personas?
A buyer persona is a detailed description of your audience, which represents your ideal customers. It is a fictional person who shows your best potential customers’ characteristics like:
1)Demographics:
Gender
Age
Race
Marital status
Number of children
Occupation
Annual income
Education level
Religion
2)Geographics:
Country
City
Province
3) Psychographics:
Habits
Values
Hobbies
Painpoints
Hopes
Motivational reasons
What are the characteristics of practical buyer persons?
Remember that the main reason for creating the buyer persons is to identify and satisfy customers’ needs.
For this purpose, all members of the relevant teams should be present when preparing the buyer persona.
Main features of the right buyer personas:
1) They are simple, and all team members can understand them.
2) They are regularly updated (this item is more for startups).
3) They tell customers’ stories containing not only information and details such as age or gender, but also the reason customers need our services.
4)They indicate the customer’s pain points.
4) How should we create a buyer persona for our business?
As I said before, the purpose of building a buyer persona is to identify customers’ needs for providing a better user experience, and what better source than customers themselves to identify them?
Wherever you need to sell a service or product, you can use buyer personas. For example, many of the world’s leading companies use this technique for their customers and others who affect the decision-making process, like CEOs and CFOs.
How to create a buyer persona:
There are two general methods for creating buyer personas:
- Internal method
- External method
Internal methods include:
- Brainstorm with your team members
- Interview with the sales and marketing teams
1. Brainstorming:
This method is generally recommended for startups and companies that have just started their business and do not yet have many customers.
Although practical personas must be based on research, you can start with assumptions if you don’t have enough customers. During the product evolution, you can complete your personas by conducting interviews and asking your prospects.
In this way, team members talk about their ideal customer and mention their characteristics.
Interview with the sales and marketing teams:
Your marketing and sales teams are the closest unit to customers and can provide you the best information about your customers. Talk to them and ask them for information about customers.
2. External method:
In this way, you can provide information about your customers through interviews or online surveys.
5) Real example of a buyer persona:
In this section, I will mention an example that I recently ran for one of my clients.
My client is developing an application in the field of crowdfunding exclusively for amateur singers and composers. Therefore, one of our initial suggestions after market segmentation and targeting the best segment market segment was to provide a buyer persona.
To prepare a buyer persona, we talked to five potential customers and collected information in all three areas (demographic, geographic, and psychographic). After that, we consulted with the team members about the interview’s outcomes.
You can download the template from here.
