What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a fictional representation of a person who is most likely to buy your product or service. Businesses create personas based on market research and online data about their current buyers. The information that’s used to inform customer personas includes demographics, motivations, goals, and behavior patterns.
Buyer personas develop empathy towards your audience and indicate what features they want or need to make their lives better. To grow your brand, you need to meet and exceed customer expectations. The key to achieving that? Identifying your customer’s pain points and needs to set up marketing campaigns that are relatable and attractive to them.
How to create a buyer persona
Creating buyer personas can be a very long process due to gathering and interpreting different kinds of data. Since buyer personas are different from normal customers, you should decide if the end-user and buyer are the same for your product or service. You can plan scenarios to see if you need to build both buyer and user personas.
When you create an ecommerce marketing plan based on satisfying your buyer personas, you develop trust with the real customers they represent. It’s easier to improve customer engagement, generate more profits, and gain reputation when you’re intentional with your marketing.
Below, we’ve shared the steps you can take to create your buyer personas. Know that it can take several weeks or even months to create your persona, depending upon the resources available to you.
1. Gather data
First, you should put together a list of data points about current and previous customers. This list can include information from your sales and marketing, email lists, and social media profiles. It is important to ask yourself if this customer information comes from the buyer or the end-user of your product or service. The process will get easier if you create two buckets of information. You will create buyer persona details into one bucket and user persona details into the other.
Here’s a snapchat of information you’ll need to collect to build your persona:
- Demographics: Gender, age, location, family size, education, career industry, and income.
- Interests: Favorite brands, what channels do they prefer? (Instagram, TikTok, email, etc.), tech-savviness, and lifestyle.
- Goals: What do they wish to achieve with a product?
- Pain points: What problems do they save? Does your product have a feature that could solve any of them?
- Motivations: What gets them moving? Is it fear, logic, or emotion?
- Buying patterns: How frequently do they shop online? What is their average order size? Do they shop on a marketplace or directly through storefronts?
This research into the target audience will lead to a data pool to gather details. You can use the data and perform user research with this set of people. User research allows you to ask questions about buying behavior, highlighting important information to hand off to product development or marketing departments.
2. Spot trends
Now that you have all the information on buyers, you can pick trends from this information. At this stage, you should have a sample size big enough to pull the necessary details from.
For example, if you can only find data points applying to 20 buyers within your system, it is not enough people to make a sample. Building a persona with such information can harm your business more than doing any good. Therefore, the sample size should be big to derive an ideal buyer representation.
To identify trends, start by searching for consumer reports relevant to your industry. Also, consider joining communities in your space where people are active. It can also be a good idea to follow influencers and watch the subjects they talk about.
3. Organize information
After you’ve collected primary and secondary information, it’s time to sit down and organize. Begin with the pain points and develop your persona from there. Do people of the same gender have the same pain points? Organize the data that you’ve collected to see if any patterns emerge.
4. Create your personas
Now you are at the stage where you can develop the actual persona, which you can start from scratch or use a template. Building a buyer persona is the same as a user persona, but only with a different person in mind. Common things to include in both personas are:
- Name
- Photo
- Demographics
- Description
- Frustrations
- Goals
- Online and offline behavior
5. Take your persona company-wide
Distributing the buyer persona to your departments is essential because all teams are updated to mirror that information. Salespeople can have more meaningful service as they understand all pain points when someone contacts a business.
Why create a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is very important for various reasons. Having a clearly defined persona can help many of your business departments within the company.
Marketing
When the marketing department creates promotional campaigns around a product or service, it is essential to consider the buyer and end-user. Sometimes, these are different people, and the messaging has to be altered. For example, a landing page on your website needs to mention product features for the end-user and prices for the end buyer. In this way, you speak prominently on the page to both audiences simultaneously.
Sales
Every sales department requires collateral to give to their potential customers. You can draft outreach emails, posters, presentations with the help of this collateral. Using buyer personas to inform this collateral means more information is targeted and on the point. This is why having clear details means higher conversion rates as customers feel more transparency and trust you more.
Product development
Product development relies on creating a product or service that customers love, but sometimes this is not important when the buyer is not the end-user. Imagine a child who would love a toy, but the toy looks a little unsafe to use. There is no chance that this toy will be good for the well-being of that child. In this case, your product development department has to work alongside your buyer persona to ensure all necessary steps are undertaken to make your product more beneficial for the user and the buyer.
Customer service
Finally, the customer service department needs to be informed that sometimes a product might not be contacting them; it can also be the buyer. A simple request can seem more complex in this scenario, as the buyer won’t understand the little details. Customer service agents need to be patient and understand the buyer’s sentiments to give the best information. Providing buyer personas to your customer service agents will greatly improve customer satisfaction.
How a business should use buyer personas
Look from customer’s POV
Marketers like to use buzzwords and corporate language that have no real meaning. Thanks to buyer personas, you can avoid all that confusion and focus on real people who respond to your content and read your messages. Buyer personas will let you emphasize being more customer-centric and solving their issues. Consider your buyer persona each time you decide on marketing or overall business strategy.
Target ads efficiently
Social media advertising now offers you a more detailed targeting opportunity. When a business defines buyer personas, it can leverage social content in the form of ads that speak to your target demographic. Then with buyer persona information, you can put these ads in front of the right people. Content should be tailor-made for buyer personas. Taking the targeting campaign to the next level will increase your conversion rate and improve your social campaigns.
Increase ROI
A buyer persona spring is a method of connecting your business objectives to your buyer persona. The name “spring” comes from having 3 stages, or rather sections that a business should try to conquer by setting objectives:
- Content: think about the content that your buyer persona is the most interested in.
- Channels: figure out which social channels are the most popular among your buyer personas.
- Data: valuable and insightful data provides information that you can later leverage to adjust your campaign.