Creating the Perfect Buyer Persona: A Step-by-Step Guide

Creating a buyer persona is an important part of building a successful marketing plan.

A buyer persona accurately reflects the needs, interests, and behaviors of your ideal customer.

With this knowledge in hand, you’ll be better able to customize your marketing messages, generate leads and drive conversions from your target audience.

Buyer Persona + Inbound Marketing

Let me put the bottom line up front!

If your customer's Buyer Persona isn't at the very heart of your inbound marketing strategy, you are doing it wrong. 

Buyer Persona is the buzzword of the inbound marketing world. If you've been marketing of late, even remotely, you must have heard the term ‘Buyer Persona.’ 

It's tossed around like everyone has one, and everybody knows what it is. 

But if you feel that you don’t precisely know what Buyer Persona means and why it is important, trust me, you are not alone. 

Read through this article and you’ll find answers to all your queries. 

So, let me begin with the definition!

What Is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a thoroughly researched profile of your target audience. 

Source: uxpressia.com

It highlights the following traits of your prospective customers:

• personality
• preferences
• patterns 

Creating a detailed buyer persona will help your sales team discover:

• Who are your qualified leads?
• What are their likes and dislikes?
• How do they spend their day?
• What problems are they trying to solve?
• How do they make decisions? 

It is not uncommon to have multiple buyer personas for a business. 

For instance, if your prospective consumer needs to get approval from others before deciding to purchase, you'll need a separate buyer persona to address the needs of everyone involved in the decision cycle.  

This helps businesses to understand the requirements of their customers and serve them better. 

Why is it Considered Important to Focus on the Buyer Persona?

A rookie's mistake, which most businesses make, is to focus their marketing strategy on what they do and how good they are at it. Totally disregarding what the customer needs. This puts them on a tangent with how their target audience makes decisions.  

While choosing a product or service, people gravitate instinctively toward businesses with a positive reputation. And, the key to creating trust is to demonstrate sincere empathy and concern for your clientele, both existing and prospective.

Earning the confidence of your client as a business involves the subtle art of how you present yourself.

In doing so, you must show your potential customers that you understand their problems and needs. 

Remember...

Only when they are sure that there is something for them in what you have to say, will they explore your offer.     

Creating a buyer persona, and using them consistently to steer your marketing strategy, will help in keeping you focused on your customer's needs. It also ensures that marketing, sales, product development, and customer support all have the same view of your ideal customer.

Types of buyer personas

Below are a few buyer persona examples at different stages from production to sales. 

• Product Development: Buyer persona can be used to build product roadmaps based on what your customers need the most.
• Marketing: Buyer Persona helps build effective marketing strategies. For instance, content marketing helps in identifying focus keywords. Also, it helps in the identification and prioritization of promotional activities.
• Sales: Buyer Persona helps your sales soar and build a rapport with potential customers by highlighting the potential customers’ problems for businesses so that they can come up with the solution that sells. 
• Customer Support: Buyer personas help customer support teams to be more useful in being trained on problems that customers are facing with your product and empathize with the frustration that these problems may cause to your clients. Just a little compassion can do wonders in comforting an annoyed customer.

How to Create a Buyer Persona?

It's pretty straightforward to see why a buyer persona is relevant for big businesses with more employees. Larger companies have bigger marketing budgets and can spend more time and resources narrowing down their target market.

A solopreneur or a small business may say “we know our clients, why should we waste time and money?” Regardless of your marketing budget, finding your target audience will have a tremendous impact on your marketing ROI.  

For instance, self-employed personal trainers with a website where they share tips and tricks for staying fit. So, you would need a buyer persona to narrow your focus to customers who are more likely to Google you.

The buyer persona suggests, for example, that the majority of your clients are women in their early 20s. So, you want to target this audience. You would likely edit the copy of your website, optimize your Instagram, market on TikTok, and choose blog topics and posts that relate to the problems and solutions of women in their early 20s, your prime target audience. 

Define Your Customer.

The first step towards creating an accurate buyer persona is to define who your ideal customer is. Think about factors like age and gender, education level, job title, personal hobbies, and outside interests they may have. 

These details will help you better understand the needs and desires of each customer segment you are targeting so that you can tailor your messaging to them more effectively.

Brainstorm Qualities and Attributes.

After you have identified the demographics, it’s time to start filling out your buyer persona. Start by brainstorming qualities and attributes that your ideal customer may have. 

Think about their goals, motivations, challenges, and pain points they might be facing in relation to the product or service you offer. 

Take into account their buying habits and purchase decisions. This will help you craft more personalized messages and content focused on what truly matters to them.

Identify Your Ideal Target Audience.

Understanding your target market is the key to creating a successful buyer persona. Start by researching who your current customers are and ask yourself questions like 

“Who needs our product or service?” or “Who would be most interested in what we offer?” 

You should also take into account factors such as geographic location, gender, age, interests, and hobbies that could help you identify who your ideal target audience should be.

Conduct Market Research & Dive into Data.

Research is a critical step in creating the perfect buyer persona. Conducting market research and exploring data such as web analytics, surveys, polls, and focus groups can help provide valuable insights into your target market’s needs, wants, and preferences. 

This can range from uncovering their goals to understanding what motivates them to buy your product or service. 

By researching the data available to you, you’ll be able to create a more detailed and accurate buyer persona.

Put It All Together and Assign a Name & Image to Your Buyer Persona

After collecting the four elements of a buyer persona and synthesizing key insights, you should be able to develop clear user profiles. Put it all together and assign a name, image, and personality to your buyer persona. This will help you more effectively engage with your target customers. 

Additionally, framing customer research in terms of a specific person will make it easier for you to personalize content and tailor messaging for that target market. Doing so helps foster customer loyalty and engagement - important components to keep in mind throughout your long-term marketing strategy.

B2B Buyer Persona

Buyer persona includes a mix of internal and external research, but you don't have to do it all at once. Starting small and letting your client base grow over time is a digital marketing strategy for beginners. 

Choose one type of target audience and develop an identity based on what you already know, then create an inbound marketing strategy and keep improving it with research.  

The easiest way to get started is to build a list of questions you will use to interview your team members.

You'll be able to develop your first buyer’s persona after you've done your research on the lines. 

Try to create a single-page document or slide for each buyer's persona. This way, you can quickly pull it up or print it out and use it as a reference.

When you get your first target customer, you must work to improve it by talking to clients and asking them to complete surveys. Buyer personas should not be fixed documents; they must evolve as you learn about new personalities, preferences, and patterns of your prospects.  So be patient and open to new ideas along the way.

Free Buyer Persona Templates

Below are a few free buyer persona templates that will come in handy while you set out to make your first buyer persona. Have a look and choose what best suits your business. 

• Health Care Network Sector – Target Audience is Working Moms

• Marketing Sector – Target Audience is Marketing Managers

• Lifestyle – Target Audience is Potential Pet Owners

A buyer persona is a fictional depiction of your different customer groups that can assist you in tailoring critical aspects of your sales and support for better numbers. 

Build a profile that defines:

• the context
• job requirements
• key information sources
• priorities, challenges
• preferred content type 
• objections

As well as the position in the procurement process of each of your customer groups.