How to Create a Buyer Persona
A detailed buyer persona allows you to understand the ideal client you’re trying to attract and relate to them as if you knew them personally. Having in-depth knowledge of your buyer persona helps you to create compelling content marketing strategies that have a high ROI. Your customer acquisition and retention levels will be high because you provide products that meet the specific needs of your customers.
Merely knowing your target clients as a particular profession or age is not enough. You need to go deep into their lives and understand their motivation as well as pain points. Such a well-crafted buyer persona will make it easier for you to tailor your products and services to the behaviors of different groups.
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal client based on data from your existing clients, market research, and educated assumptions. It helps you understand your audience and provide the right products to meet their needs.
By thoroughly analyzing trends, similarities, and patterns among your target audience, you can create a formidable marketing strategy around their daily challenges. By providing target-focused content, you inform your audience that you know their problems, and you are interested in helping them find solutions. By telling a familiar story, you instantly gain their trust.
Why buyer personas are necessary for the growth of your business
Buyer personas are the most crucial part of any marketing strategy. If you don’t understand the challenges and motivations of your potential customer, then your conversion rates will be low because your strategy is unclear. If you cannot get your audience to trust you, then how can they buy your products?
The purpose of creating a buyer persona is to determine who you want to attract, how to delight them and convert them into loyal clients. A buyer persona helps your business to understand what it should be doing to help its prospects along the stages of the buying stages. You learn how to capture the attention of your audience at the right time with the correct information.
Moreover, a forensically, accurate buyer persona enables you to segment your audience. Consequently allowing you to provide clear and targeted messaging. The more specific you are in your content, the easier it is to stand out from the clutter of information available online.
How to create a detailed buyer persona in 5 simple steps
Formulating a powerful buyer persona requires patience, time, and great effort. To come up with the project, you have to question yourself and colleagues to define who can be interested in your product. These questions should help you lay out the framework of your ideal clients and leverage the information you find to design tailored products that are appealing. Follow these steps to create a buyer persona for your business.
#1 Do thorough audience research
Having a clear knowledge of who you want to target is an essential step to building a detailed buyer persona. You can learn more about your audience by interviewing existing clients or conducting surveys in exchange for a freebie. You can also look for resources related to your target clients that are available online such as case studies.
#2 Identify customer pain points
Get as much information as you can on the challenges your customers have. This knowledge will enable you to create a precise and intricate marketing strategy that your prospects will find irresistible. The more familiar you are with their pain points, the easier it is to formulate informative content that helps clients make intelligent buying decisions and win their trust as an expert in your industry.
#3 Identify customer goals
People make choices and decisions due to underlying goals and fears. To create an effective buyer persona, you must understand the goals that are behind the choices your target clients make. By learning what motivates them to buy your product, you can formulate accurate marketing messages that your prospects will find compelling.
#4 Understand how your brand can help
After researching the goals and pain points of your customers, the next step is to determine how your business will provide solutions to their problems. Start developing content and prospect-orientated advertising that is directed towards the target audience and their pain points. Find unique solutions to each problem you identify in your research.
#5 Turn your research into buyer personas
After getting all the necessary details about your target clients and formulating the solutions to each of their needs, the next step is to create a buyer persona. Include every information accurately to ensure easy understanding of who you are trying to attract. You can look into the next section to see an example of a buyer persona.
Buyer persona examples you can use to define your ideal customers
It is easy to undertake any project once you get a sample to guide you. With these buyer persona examples, you will be able to create a detailed one for your business. Let me show you the components of a buyer persona template.
Elements of a buyer persona template
#1Semi-fictional character
A buyer persona is built around the life of a character who can fit in the real world. It has a name and probably lives like your ideal client.
#2Day in their life
By describing how a day in the life of your ideal customer looks like, you learn about their challenges and motives.
#3Demographics
Here you provide details about your ideal client, such as the income range, age, location, and level of education. This information allows you to be more specific when providing content to your target audience.
#4Persona’s goals
You need to know the goals and ambitions of your prospect to create marketing strategies that are irresistible and win their trust. You also make products that help them to achieve their goals efficiently.
#5Pain points
Visualize your ideal clients’ problems and gain their attention by empathizing with them. Show them that you understand what they are going through, and you developed a product to help them get out of their situation.
#6Information Search Process
Discover how your clients get information about how to improve their conditions. For example, a university student hangs out on social media, youtube, and search engines. You can hatch the perfect way to get to your audience without irritating them.
#7 Desired outcomes
When you know what your ideal customer expects of you after becoming buying your product, you’ll easily attract them by providing compelling promises directed to their expectations.
- Image
An image of the semi-fictional character makes your buyer persona look more real to you. You can imagine having a conversation with him/her when you’re producing content for your target audience.
Include these components in your persona template to come with a resourceful buyer persona for your business.
Here are examples of buyer personas.
Example 1
Name: Saul Goodman
Profession: Business owner
Goals: Increase sales and dominate the regional market
Challenges: Lack skills in marketing and is busy running the business
Demographics
Age: 33- 45
Income: 300k+
Education: Bachelor degree in accounting
Location: Los Angeles City
Saul is married and has 2 kids. He built his company after completing his degree in Accounting at the University of Southern California. He knows every aspect of his company since he started as a soloprenuer and later expanded his team. He understands accounting and is innovative. Saul loves taking on new opportunities and is not afraid of failures. He shops online and is active on social media.
Saul knows that dedicated marketing is the best way to expand his business. He has read about digital marketing and has social media accounts, including Twitter, Instagram, and Linkedin. Saul rarely participates in online discussions because he is busy running his business. He is aware that most of his potential clients are online. And the best way to get to attract them is by performing aggressive online marketing. However, he understands that he is not an expert in marketing, and hiring a digital marketing guru would save him both time and money while helping him achieve his business goals. He wants someone who will provide creative solutions to his needs.
Example 2
Name: James St.Patrick
Profession: Nightclub owner
Goals: Expand his club empire to other cities across the country
Challenges: Losses, raising funds for expansion
Demographics
Age: 35- 45
Income: 800k+
Education: Diploma in Music
Location: City
James is married and has 3 kids. He started his business out of savings and has since expanded his nightclubs. He oversees his employees as they bring in the inventory and supply their customers in the night. Once in a while, he hosts celebrities.
James is ambitious and wants to expand his presence to other cities. However, he is having difficulty raising the money for his expansion. He is also regularly having losses due to the mismanagement of funds in his company. James knows he needs a financial advisor who can help him make the right decisions and show him how to get the necessary funds to create new nightclubs.
Example 3
Name: Shania Gamble
Profession: Freelance writer
Goals: Increase her income to 5-figures monthly, land high-paying clients, spend more time with her family.
Challenges: Difficulty in raising money for freelance writing courses, unreliable low-paying clients
Demographics
Age: 20- 30
Income: $700 – 1000
Education: Diploma in English
Location: Urban
Story
Shania is a single lady who has completed college. She has been doing freelance writing since her final semester in college. She works content mills such as Upwork and Fiverr, where she gets work that she doesn’t like for low pay. She dreams of scaling her freelancing career and landing reliable high-paying clients. She has joined multiple email lists about how to increase her income. She has tried job boards but didn’t succeed. She knows influencers in the freelancing industry and intends to take one of their courses, but they are too expensive. She wants a successful freelance writer to mentor her and, if possible, provide a course at affordable rates. She believes that after taking a course, she will be able to grow her income as well as her network.
Utilize the potential of buyer personas to grow your business
Now that you have learned how to create a buyer persona, what are you going to do next? We are digital marketing experts ourselves. We can help you formulate a detailed buyer persona using our tested buyer persona template and create effective strategies that will attract your ideal audience.
At IDI, our experts will help achieve your business goals by providing in-depth information about your ideal customer’s pain points and motives. We will conduct a thorough strategy audit to come up with buyer personas for each of your products. We will interview your clients as well as you and your colleagues to get a better picture of your ideal client’s needs. Consequently, we will propose formidable strategies that will appeal to your prospects and make you stand out from the competition. Let us help you achieve your business goals!