How to Create a Detailed Buyer Persona for Your Business
Are you someone who is facing difficulty in trying to target your ideal customer?
Are you unsure of how to identify who is a prospective client and who is there to just waste your time?
If you answered yes to both of these questions, then continue reading for the sake of your business!
This article will help you in defining and building your very own buyer persona, also known as a customer persona, audience persona, user persona, or even marketing persona.
What is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a fictional character that represents a non-fictional target audience, which are your ideal customers. A buyer persona is based on research and collected data, in order to help you narrow your time on competent prospects that are suitable as your target market. While your buyer persona is not a real customer, it embodied the characteristics that your potential customers may have.
By having a thorough understanding of your personas, you will be able to increase your customer acquisition and retention by attracting high-value clients and leads to your business.
The idea of personas is to think about them as if they were real customers. With that being said, you will give the persona a name, demographic details, interests, and behavioral traits. This will further help you in understanding their goals, pain points, buying patterns, etc.… You can also use icons to distinguish each persona from each other.
NOTE:You are probably going to create several products to represent each segment of your target audience.
The personas you create will thus be able to guide you from the product development to the voice of your brand to the social media channels that you choose.
How Should My Business Use A Buyer Persona?
Because buyer personas help you in understanding your prospective customers, you will be able to tailor your content and services to meet the specific needs and behaviors that your personas are facing. This will make your business more impactful because you are putting the needs and concerns of your clients first.
The strongest personas you can create should be based on market research and customer insights that are collected from your actual clients through different methods such as surveys, interviews, questionnaires, etc.
The following are ways your businesses can use personas:
1. Reframe your work from the customer’s perspective by focusing on addressing your customer’s priorities and concerns instead of your own.
How Can I Create A Buyer Persona?
There are several steps to follow when getting started with creating your buyer persona:
1. Conduct a Market Research on Your Audience
The first step is to collect data and insights on your existing clients and social audience, by researching real-world data. Some of the data you can collect include but are not limited to:
- Age
- Location
- Language
- Buying Patterns
- Spending Power
- Interests
- Challenges
Keep in mind, if you’re conducting a persona for a business (B2B), consider the size of their business and who is in charge of making the purchasing decisions.
You can gather such information from the social media analytics offered from each channel, your customer database (interviews, etc.), as well as Google Analytics.
One good research tactic is to see what your competitors have already done, you can use tools like Buzzsumoto search for the top shared content across their social networks.
2. Identify Your Customer’s Pain Points
It is important to understand the problems that your customers are facing in order to learn how to solve them.
One way of doing this is to engage in social listening and social media sentiment analysis: to consider the emotions and opinions that people feel about your brand, online.
You can also set up search streams in order to monitor who mentions your brand, products, or competitors, in order to observe what others are saying about you online. This can help understand why people may or may not enjoy your business. Moreover, you can also check with your customer service team to identify the questions they are being asked regularly. This can help you in finding out patterns that some groups are facing challenges in.
3. Identify Your Customer’s Goals
While pain points are the problems that your customers are facing, goals are the positive things they are aspiring to achieve. This is where you come in by turning them into gain points.
Even though your persona’s goals might not relate to your business, they are still important because this is more about getting to know your customers better.
What motivates your customers? What is their end-game?
By socially listening to your customers, you can find more about their end goals. Your sales team can be a good source in collecting these insights because they have a good understanding on what your clients are trying to achieve.
4. Understand How You Can Help Your Customers
Once you have become aware of your customers’ pain points and goals, you can start to develop a clear picture of how your product/service might help. By doing so, you should analyze your product/service can benefit your customers, instead of focusing only on the features that you provide. This means discovering how your brand can make your customer’s life easier.
For each of the pain points and goals you collected, ask yourself these questions:
1. How can we help?
2. What are your customers main purchasing barriers & how can you overcome them?
3. At what stage are your followers at in their buying journey?
5. Create Your Buyer Persona(s)
In the last step, you will gather everything you collected and search for the common characteristics. By grouping the data together, you will begin to have the basis of your personas.
You want your persona to seem like a real person, so give them a name, job title, home, etc.
For example, let’s say you identify a group of pregnant mothers in their early 30s who live in big cities and are searching for healthy eat options. Awesome, now it is time to take such characteristics and turn them into a persona that your company can identify with and speak to.
Create your free buyer persona here: https://xtensio.com/user-persona-template/
Remember, a list of characteristics is not a persona. A persona instead is a realistic description of someone who represents a segment of your customer base.
Think about your personas every time you make a decision about your overall marketing strategy. Create detailed personas and see how your bonds with real customers will improve, boosting your sales and brand loyalty!
For more information, don’t hesitate to check out our website, or contact us for help in developing your buyer personas!
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