A buyer persona is the ideal customer or buyer profile for the products or services that a business is selling. It is based on information obtained from market research, as well as current and potential customers.
It is important to realize that a buyer persona is not used to define the profile of your existing customers, but rather what your perfect customers would be like. It is possible that both of these will already coincide. If this is the case, then you are in luck!
Creating a buyer persona should be a priority for any company. Carrying out this type of research shows that the company cares about its potential customers and is trying to understand them and adapt the product or service, along with its message, to their needs.
Buyer personas are almost like a type of “fictional character”. Developing these profiles will allow you to define all the ideal characteristics that the perfect customer should have. However, as you already know from experience, in reality every customer has their own unique traits and tendencies.
A buyer persona is a profile that helps you to find out as much as possible about your target audience. This enables the team members of your company to accurately define and understand the perfect customers for your product or service.
→ Define your buyer persona, so you can design a better user experience
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Having a buyer persona is important because it gives meaning to your business. A product or service needs someone to buy it. If it is not clear who that person is, how they think and feel, and where they are located, it will be very difficult to increase sales.
And this approach is not only beneficial for you, but also for your customers. By improving your message and product content and making it more targeted, you are demonstrating that your brand knows its customers and understands the information and purchasing conditions they require.
How can you resist a product or service that feels like it was made just for you? A buyer persona may be a fictional character, but it will help you win loyal customers.
→ Related topic: How to promote brand loyalty within your customer network
To create a buyer persona, you need raw customer data, from which you can extract common patterns and denominators.
The end goal is to build a profile of the ideal buyer persona, based on information about real customers. Complaints and reviews, interests, search engine keywords, platforms used, difficulties they have encountered during the process, etc.
Every customer has a set of unique characteristics. In order to create buyer personas, it is necessary to identify the characteristics they all have in common.
The buyer persona may be very clear for your business already, but you may be surprised to discover new niches that you had never even considered before.
For example, if you sell sewing machines you could start with a typical profile of an elderly female customer who likes to sew. But did you think about a younger buyer persona? This could possibly be someone who owns a clothing store of who makes handbags, who is looking for affordable sewing machines for stitching labels.
When creating a buyer persona, you have to include basic information, such as demographics, tendencies and habits, online and offline purchasing behavior, and any values they have that are applicable to the product or service.
→ Discover more: Why the multichannel approach is the future of ecommerce
So now, how can you get ALL that information?
If you already have your business up and running, you can use data from current or former customers. You could also use potential customers or cold calling via third parties, work colleagues or social media, especially if you are interested in researching a new market or space.
→ Check it out: How to use heat maps software to analyze the traffic on your site
Once you have collected, analyzed and identified the key data relating to your buyer persona, create profiles that everyone in your company can consult. It can be a good idea to create fake names and use stock photos for your buyer persona profiles, to make them feel more human. This is not completely necessary and will depend on how your employees can best handle the information.
Is one buyer persona enough? Or do you need more than one? Again, this will depend on your business model.
Ideally, it is best to start with one, but often there may be as many as 5. Just create as many as you need.
However, for obvious reasons you shouldn’t have more than 20. It will cause you to lose sight of your objective and increase the amount of work that needs to be done.
Companies that have a high number of buyer personas, usually offer services with a long procurement chain involving several different people. It is not as useful to reach out to a company’s marketing department, who could discover your software by chance on an Internet forum, than to contact the CEO directly, as they will be the one to decide if the service should be implemented by the company.
Finding the perfect customer sometimes feels like looking for a needle in a haystack. The difference between positive and negative buyer personas can be hard to define. To make this process easier, we find it helpful to use an analogy, such as peacocks and ostriches.
Your goal is the “peacock” approach. You can project the best possible image of your brand to this type of customer and make them aware of all the advantages of your product or service. It is a useful profile for attracting the right type of customers.
On the other hand, you should avoid the “ostrich” approach. This type of customer is not going to get you any conversions and should be eliminated from your marketing and sales radar.
As soon as you see one, bury your head in the sand!
Defining your negative buyer persona can be useful for customer segmentation, and to reduce traffic and queries that don’t result in conversions.
This could be students who only visit your website looking for content for assignments, or customers who do not have the technical knowledge needed to use your service, or the level of purchasing power required to buy your range of products.
Do you want to have a look at some examples of buyer personas?
Here are a couple of examples of different types of buyer personas, which will give you an idea about the kind of effect they can have and how easy they are to consult.
If you are worried about how you are going to manage all the information that is required to create your buyer persona, there are software resources for automating this task. Tools like Xtensio’s User Persona Creator or Make My Persona by Hubspot are platforms that are very easy to use. They allow you to gather information about your customers and setup profiles that you can review and adjust at any time.
There is some key data that must be included in every buyer persona profile:
The more questions you include, the more detailed your buyer persona will be. However, sometimes you don’t need to ask about everything. If you sell hair dryers, chances are you don't need to know what your customer's childhood was like or if they prefer dogs or cats.
The layout and format of the buyer persona is also important: make the process of compiling information very easy for your customers. It is also important that the buyer persona profiles are very intuitive for your team members to consult.
And remember that if you use buyer persona templates as questionnaires for real users, you must guarantee the protection of their data, their anonymity and that they will not be contacted in the future by the sales team.
Now you know what a buyer persona is in theory, even if you haven’t worked out what yours is yet.
Getting started is easier than it sounds, although it does require rolling up your sleeves and doing extensive research on your target audience and customers. It is a rewarding process because it benefits all the departments of the company.
Keep expanding and modifying your buyer persona regularly, because they are not set in stone and can evolve. The customers’ preferences can change, and your company and the markets you are targeting can also change.
To change quickly, it's important to keep on top of everything: product data centralization software like Sales Layer's PIM allows you to update and synchronize your content across all your channels. Try it for 30 days or have a look at the guided demo to find out everything you need to create your buyer persona: quality product content.