How To Build A Buyer Persona

In order to effectively promote your products, you need to have a target customer in mind. Understanding what your customers need and desire helps you make important decision when adding new features, marketing your products, and creating your brand image. Creating buyer personas is the best way to help you understand your audience’s motivating factors and help you deliver the best possible experience. If you’ve never created a buyer persona before, or you want to refresh your current buyer personas, here are some tips to help you get started.

What Is A Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. Buyer personas aid in making informed business decisions and help you understand what exactly your ideal customer is looking for. Many businesses have multiple buyer personas to represent different target audiences. If you choose to have multiple buyer personas, make sure that you keep the number small enough that you can focus on each group. In addition to creating buyer personas, it is a good idea to create negative personas. Negative personas are the opposite of buyer personas- audience’s that you do not want purchasing from you. Negative personas are often those who will take your time but not purchase from you. Signs of a negative persona are customers whose budget does not fit the price range of your products, customers who are already extremely loyal to one of your one of your competitors, or those you are outside of the geographic location where you can provide your products or services. It is important to be kind and respectful to all of your customers, however you should not target everyone.

How To Create A Buyer Persona:

Start with broad traits and narrow them down. What are the demographics of your target audience? If you have an established company, look into similarities that your current customers have. Age, gender, martial and family status, location, education can be important factors. Think about where your buyer persona is professionally. If you are targeting college students, your buyer persona is going to look different that if you were targeting someone in their late 30’s. What industry do they work in? What is their salary range? You want to make sure that your buyer persona is someone that your product can benefit, in addition to being something within their price range. Take into consideration your buyer personas psychographics. Are there any values or beliefs they have that are important to them? Do they have an active lifestyle or are they more sedentary? Any information you can gather will help you in creating your buyer persona!

How To Use A Buyer Persona:

Now that you have your buyer persona, it’s time to put it to good use! Start by creating a buyer persona template, or using one that is available to you online. Fill in the information about your buyer persona, and add in some keywords that will help you target them. Name each persona that you create- it can be a simple name such as John Doe or a silly name to help you remember that specific persona, such as Mother Martha. For example, say you are trying to sell non-toxic cleaning products. You find that new mothers want to keep a clean space and use products that will not be harmful or irritating to their children, while being able to clean up difficult messes. You use Mother Martha as your buyer persona. She is between the ages of 24-32. She lives in the United States and is a stay at home mom. Mother Martha is looking for a cleaning product that is easy for her to order online or find in stores, wants it to have a nice scent that is not too powerful, and be able to clean out any messes caused by her children without harmful chemicals. Her concerns are toxic ingredients, cleaning power, and affordability. With this information, you can address her concerns while assuring her that your product will meet her needs.

Creating a buyer persona does take time and research, but it worth the effort. Knowing who you are targeting helps you make the most out of your marketing efforts and helps you evaluate what is most important to your customers. Once you create your buyer persona, make sure to re-visit it every so often to make sure that they still reflect who your ideal customer is.