Reading Time: 5 minutes
It’s hard to create an effective advertising or marketing campaign without first creating effective buyer personas. Trying to do so can also be detrimental to your bottom line. In fact, ads that weren’t behaviorally targeted were found to be half as effective as their behaviorally-targeted counterparts.
Making defined buyer personas helps your business reach your audience, get more leads, and ensure that you’re always thinking about how you can be the best fit for your customers, as well as which customers or clients will be the best fit for you.
In this article, we go over the most essential components of a buyer persona, the process behind creating one, and why they are so vital to the success of your digital marketing and advertising efforts.
What Is a Buyer Persona?
Buyer personas are fictional representations of what you believe to be your ideal customers. They are a tool that helps you identify your target customers so that your marketing teams can spend time on qualified prospects and guide product development to suit the needs of your target audience.
Creating a buyer persona (or, more commonly, several buyer personas) will help you attract high-value leads to your business, which means more potential customers. In addition, the process of building your buyer personas will help you better understand your target market’s pain points, which will make it easier for you to create relevant content, develop well-received products, and drive sales.
Why Are Buyer Personas So Important?
One of the reasons buyer personas can positively impact your marketing campaigns and sales efforts is that they help you truly understand your customer base—their demographics, behavioral patterns, the unique challenges they face, and how they might respond to different offerings.
For example, you may know that your buyers are mainly mothers of young children, but have you dialed in on their exact needs and the drive behind them? Do you take that drive into account in your marketing and advertising campaigns? Company-specific buyer personas give you a comprehensive understanding of what makes an ideal customer for your business.
Good buyer personas are based on market research and insights that you gain from your current customers by asking them for feedback, interviewing them, or conducting surveys.
Depending on your industry, the size of your business, and the variation in the kinds of products and services you offer, you might have as few as one or two personas, or as many as six to eight.
Creating Buyer Personas
It’s a good idea to create your personas based on a mixture of hard data such as sales numbers, social media engagement rates, and online consumer data, in addition to more personal and subjective metrics like survey responses from current customers.
After sufficient research, the next step is to consider recurrent identifiers and similarities in your customers or clients. What kinds of customers do you seem to attract the most? What kinds of customers are the most beneficial for your brand to work with or sell to? The answers to these questions enable your marketing and sales teams to make improvements at every level.
Let’s take a more detailed look at what characteristics you need to include when creating a buyer persona and how to go about doing so.
Basic Demographics and Behaviors
It’s helpful to know basic information about who makes up most of your lead pool. During your research and analysis, you can learn about the following customer identifiers:
- Age
- Geographic location
- Profession
- Language
- Gender
- Spending power and patterns
- Interests
- Motivators
- Challenges
- Stages of life
There are many ways to find this information, including conducting social media market research, looking at your website analytics, using surveys and direct communication, or investing in a customer data platform or full-service marketing agency.
Identify Your Customer’s Pain Points
Depending on the kind of products you offer, your audience’s goals and pain points might be personal or professional. However, the question remains—what motivates your customers? What do they want to achieve, and what problems do they want to solve?
One way to answer these questions is by engaging in social listening or social media sentiment analysis. For example, you can set up search streams and monitor the mentions of your brand and products on the internet. That way, you can better understand why people love your products, which can give insight into what pain points you’re currently solving for them.
Additionally, direct interaction with your customers and leads is perhaps the best way to step into their shoes and see their issues more clearly. For example, if you’re on a sales call with a lead, ask them more emotion-centered questions about why they’re seeking the solution you offer and the impact that their pain point has on their daily life.
B2B? Consider Buyers’ Decision-Making Positions
If you’re a B2B company, your buyer personas should also include a decision-maker characteristic. Essentially, this means that you should understand exactly who is usually deciding to buy from you. This is important because you may have a lead pool made up of different kinds of professionals (with slightly different pain points), meaning that you need to adjust your sales pitch and marketing efforts to match.
For example, suppose you’re a fintech company whose customer base widely varies from small accounting firms to large corporations. In that case, you will likely be dealing with very different kinds of decision-makers. You might have a sales call with a tax consultant one day and a CFO the next.
Create Your Buyer Personas
After sufficient research and data analysis, it’s time to look for common characteristics. As you group these together, you will get the basis for your own unique buyer personas. From there, you can give your “characters” a name, a job, a home, daily challenges and behaviors, and other defining characteristics. This can give you a glimpse into the minds of your ideal customers and help you improve everything from content marketing to product innovation.
For example, let’s say you know that many of your best customers are middle-aged women that are often child-free, financially successful, living in urban areas and cities, and frequently ordering tickets to museums and sophisticated events. You might make the following buyer persona based on the above information:
- Her name is Stacy.
- She is 44 years old.
- She lives in New York and is the founder of a successful marketing agency.
- She’s always busy but finds time to host a book club.
- She and her friends like to go on international vacations at least once per year.
- She owns a Tesla and tries to keep up with the newest sustainable tech.
This is not just a list of characteristics. More so, it’s a nuanced description of an ideal customer that allows you to get some insight into how their mind works and why they make the choices—and purchases—they do. This enables you to think about your customers as actual, living human beings instead of just a collection of data.
The Bottom Line
Organizing your leads into archetypes helps you build an effective marketing strategy and create products that fit those people’s needs and alleviate their pain points.
Businesses of all sizes in all industries will benefit from understanding the key characteristics of their buyer personas, such as basic demographics, online behavior, purchasing patterns, motivations, and pain points.
