Build out a buyer persona

If you’re trying to grow your business, it’s critical to have a clear picture of who your customers are and what they want. A buyer persona is one way to gather that information, In this article, I’ll go over some of the benefits and pitfalls of using buyer personas in your marketing process—plus give you an easy way to create one from scratch.

What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is a description of your ideal customer. It’s a snapshot of the kind of person that you want to become your most loyal customer and advocate.

This can be anyone from your ideal client to someone who’s just starting to think about buying the product or service you provide. It’s a great way to help you focus your marketing efforts, understanding your customers better, and creating more relevant content for them. It is so much easier to talk to someone you know.

A buyer persona should include information like:

• Their age, gender, and ethnicity (you may also want to consider education level).
• The kinds of products or services they buy. For example, if you run a fitness studio for women, then your buyer persona might be someone who has recently lost weight and wants to keep it off by working out at the gym four times per week.
• The types of media they consume (this could be anything from websites they visit all the way down to specific blogs or magazines)
• Things they find important, things they love and things they hate.

Why do I need one?

A buyer persona helps with creative and strategic development. It helps you focus your marketing on the right audience, which leads to better financial results.

When you have a clear picture of who your customers are, it’s easier to create messaging that speaks their language and connects them with the products or services they need. You know what problems they’re trying to solve, so you can offer solutions in a way that resonates with them—and makes them more likely to buy from you instead of your competitors.

With this kind of insight into who your buyers are, it becomes much easier to think strategically about how you’re going to reach them effectively throughout the sales cycle while also ensuring that each touchpoint is relevant and targeted towards specific needs at different stages in the buying journey.

A buyer persona creates focus

A buyer persona can be used to help prioritize activities and projects. The buyer persona will take into account the company’s overall strategy, which will be used to inform decisions about creative and strategic development. The buyer persona can also be used to help prioritize activities and projects in a way that aligns with the goals of your business overall. That way, when you’re working on marketing materials and strategies for each of your products or services, it’ll make it easier for you to focus on what information is relevant for those specific buyers at that moment in time.

The value of the buyer persona goes beyond the initial development phase. Once you’ve put in the work to develop a buyer persona, it will help you prioritize your business’s marketing efforts. You’ll be able to determine which features are most important for each segment and which ones are unnecessary or even undesirable.

The buyer persona process also helps you understand your customers better than ever before. By investing time upfront, it’s possible to create personas that accurately represent customer behavior patterns and interests—and then use these insights as the foundation for all future decisions.

The buyer persona can also help you understand competitors’ products, services and target markets—and where there may be opportunities for differentiation through innovation or new offerings.

Building your Buyer Persona

What you put in your buyer persona will influence how all your communications and marketing efforts are received by the customers you’re targeting. Now that you know how to create a buyer persona, the next step is to actually build it.

The general process is as follows:

• Define what your ideal customer looks like and what they want or need.
• Compile information on things they like, how they spend their time and the type of information they consume and where they consume it.
• Research the specific challenges they face, and how your product or service is a perfect solution.
• Gather any data points that can help you describe them in more detail. Such as demographic, family makeup, employment status, average income, and education, to name a few.

Developing and refining the buyer persona is an iterative process, requiring frequent updating and testing. It is an ongoing process, the buyer persona you develop today will be different from the one you develop next month, and that one will likely be different again in a few months’ time. Your team may find new sources of information or uncover an entirely new group of potential customers during this period, which may necessitate some adjustments to your buyer persona document.

The bottom line: buyer personas are living documents. They should be updated regularly with any relevant information obtained from interviews or other research methods conducted by sales teams and other members of your organization.

Once you have a buyer persona in place, you’ll find that it has many uses beyond the one described above. You can use your buyer persona as an authoritative source of information to make better decisions about your product and its features. Your buyer persona will also be useful for making sure that all of your marketing efforts are aimed at the right people, so you don’t waste time chasing customers who aren’t interested or won’t buy your products anyway.

If you would like a hand creating your buyer persona, reach out! We help clients just like you develop killer marketing strategies every day!