Buyer Persona

According to experts, people are exposed to as many as 4,000-10,000 marketing messages a day. This advertising noise makes it harder for marketers to deliver the right sales pitch into the eyes and ears of the right people. 

On the other hand, today’s digital society is empowered by data and information from all sources, which makes it even harder to determine which of the marketing messages to trust and acknowledge.   

It is no mystery that people listen to recommendations from their friends and acquaintances when it comes to buying decisions. Referrals from their network are more authentic and tell a story in words and phrases that are naturally tailored to their preferences.

What if, instead of creating one universal message from your brand, you could develop a set of marketing messages and content tailor-made to the preferences of your users? 

🚀Read Customer Experience Guide: How to Put your Customers First? 

Using the available tools, researches and analytics marketers design buyers persona to understand their audience better. Thus, the marketing messages and customer experience, become more relatable and reflect the customer’s wishes, problems, needs and, aspirations.

What is a Buyer Persona? 

Picture 1. Buyer persona

Marketing or buyer persona is a fictional character, or more of them, representing the ideal customer. Buyer personas are created based on real data from the companies existing customers and detailed market research. 

The idea behind creating a buyer persona is to represent a profile of your ideal customers as he or she is a real person. This kind of approach makes it easier for companies to take better care of their customers in every sense – while developing marketing messages, create new features or services, create a better customer experience, launch new campaigns. 

Developing a buyer persona requires attention to details – the more thorough you are, more accurate the vision of your customer will be. Include as many information as you can: customer demographics, behavior, patterns, goals, motivations, hobbies, habits.  

Why is Buyer Persona Important?

In real life, people share important messages depending on who they speak with and what is their goal. Exactly that is what marketing or buyer persona helps companies do. Depending on the specific buyer persona needs, visions, aspirations and habits, marketing (and other departments) can tailor messages that speak directly to them. 

A buyer persona helps companies get a better understanding of their customers and prospects, their needs, troubles, and expectations. Using detailed descriptions, companies can go beyond crafting tailored messages. A detailed buyer persona can help companies develop new products, features, and services or inspire to take a swing to a new market. 

How many buyer personas should you create?

There is no golden rule when it comes to buyer persona creation. Most businesses should have at least a couple of buyer personas, but you don’t want to have too many, either. The number of market personas you create will depend on your business size, your niche, and your business KPIs,  but here are some questions to help you started with the idea.

How many verticals does your brand serve?

If you are a brand targeting multiple industries, so-called verticals, you definitely want to have a unique buyer persona for each one. Customers from the IT industry that uses your software or a product, will not have the same requests and demands as your Fashion industry customer. Your sales and marketing messages should reflect that. 

Are you targeting different niches in each of the vertical?

Niches are a very powerful way of speaking personally to a consumer. In the beauty industry, brands make separate products with the exact same ingredients because men’s skincare and women’s skincare are two separate niches in the beauty industry.

You don’t have to go that far and create a completely new product for your niche. But if you are targeting niches inside your industry, you should at least create separate content based around them. 

Picture 2. Target niches inside your industry

Who are your current best customers?

Before thinking of winning the next customer, take a step back to look at who have you already won over. Businesses will often find a growing trend among their loyal customers that doesn’t quite reflect their buyer persona pallet. Those people deserve their own buyer persona. 

How to Create a Buyer Persona?

Creating buyer personas can be done through surveys, interviews, and research of your target audience. Along with your current customers, you can include prospect and those outside your contact database. 

Create buyer personas in 4 easy steps:

• Go through your contact database to uncover trends among your current customers, how they find your content and consume it. 
• Use forms on your website to capture important persona information. For example, if your personas vary based on the gender or company size, ask each lead for information about their gender or company size
• Use the feedback from your sales team and ask them about the leads they’re interacting with most. What patterns do they see in their behavior? Can they make a general conclusion about the types of customers they are selling to?
• Most importantly, ask your customers and your prospects about your product and service to reflect your market personas with the real customer attitude. You can do it using your website, through an easy feedback form or in detail survey.