Digital Marketing

Buyer Persona: What is it and how to create your own

Having a detailed buyer persona for your business will help you see the human side of your customers. When you start using these profiles on your different marketing strategies, you take your target demographics to a deeper level. You understand not only who your customer is but also how to talk to them. 

 

What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer. It's created based on real and potential customers. It's a semi-fictional profile that is not specifically based on one specific person. This marketing persona should be able to represent a segment of your target audience.

It's very important to note that a buyer persona is not the same as your target audience. Your target audience defines a group of people with similar traits that your business aims at. These are the segments of people that you're already aiming at. A buyer persona will have specific traits from your target customers.

 

Why should you define a buyer persona for your business?

Sometimes you get so focused on the product or service your business is selling, that you forget to think about who you’re selling them to.

You can be a small business, or a huge company and have the greatest product/service on earth, but if you’re trying to sell it to the wrong person, you’re never going to hit your sales goals.

Before you can sell anything effectively, you need to understand the following:

  • WHO your ideal customer is.
  • WHERE they’re hanging out online.
  • WHAT their challenges are.

 

A customer-based profile will help you dive deeper into this. Creating a buyer persona for your business will help you get better results in ALL of your marketing efforts, such as:

Content Marketing

Helps you decide what blog posts, lead magnets, or social media posts to create to attract more leads and customers.

 

Paid Traffic

Helps you discover which ad platforms you should buy traffic from, and what targeting options you should use.

Product Creation

Helps you follow a better product development process and create a product that your customer actually needs.

Copywriting

Helps you communicate your offers in a way that speaks to your buyer persona, talks about their problems and how your solution will benefit them to compel them to buy.

Email Marketing

Helps you get higher open rates and better conversion rates on your emails. You can also segment specific email marketing campaigns to your different buyer personas.

Want to learn more about email marketing? Download our free eBook “Win and Keep More Customers With Email Marketing Automation”.

 

Keep in mind that you can have more than one buyer persona for your business. If your business is targeting multiple industries, you should have a unique buyer persona for each one.

This is the starting point of the majority of your business processes. It’s also the base of all marketing activities, from getting the right message and channels to creating engaging and relevant content.

 

How do you create your own buyer persona?

While a buyer persona is semi-fictional, it should represent a real person in your target audience. Buyer persona research should include a combination of quantitative (surveys, market research, etc.) and qualitative (customer interviews, testimonials, etc.) information.

There are 5 major components of a buyer persona profile:

1. Goals and Values

The best way to get started is to think about the goals and values that are important to your ideal customer. Be sure to think about the ones that are relevant to the products/services you offer.

       

2. Sources of Information

This component will help you determine in which channels and how you should advertise to your buyer persona.

To create this part of the profile, it's recommended to use the “but no one else would” trick. This way, you can answer questions like:

  • Where do they hang out online? They hang out at [SOCIAL MEDIA], but no one else would.
  • What materials do they read? They read [BOOK], but no one else would.
  • What gurus do they follow? They follow [PERSON], but no one else would.
     

When buying traffic from ad platforms like Facebook, you’ll be able to better target your audience by focusing on these niche interests.

3. Demographic Information

This section includes all the usual facts: like the person’s age, gender, marital status, income, job title, and so on. But you should be really specific when defining these. Here is where your buyer persona profile will really come to life. When you define them these traits and give them a name, you really start to feel like you're selling to this one customer representation.

4. Challenges and Pain Points

Now it's time to think about the problems, challenges, and pain points in your ideal customer’s life. This information can help you with copywriting that speaks to your customer's specific problems, and compel them to take action.

5. Objections and Role

Finally, think about the reasons why your buyer persona might choose not to buy your product/service. These are called “objections” and they must be addressed clearly in your marketing.

Here it's also important to understand their role in the buying process: are they the primary decision maker or are they a decision influencer?

 

Creating your own buyer personas will help you understand your target customers on a higher level. You will know how to best target, support, and work with your customers. You can create your own profile using the next buyer persona template provided by DigitalMarketer:

                         

At Capitaltec, we help you define your target audience AND create your own buyer persona profile aligned to your business objectives so you can keep focusing on running and reaching your goals. Schedule a call to know how we can help you.