How to Create Buyer Persona for Your Business?

Identifying the right kind of buyer is the key to the success of any business. In today’s globalized era, where the business has no boundaries, the number of people who can be targeted is unlimited. Hence identifying the potential customers, from the pool of buyers is the key to market products with maximum reach and minimum cost. The Buyer persona helps businesses in creating the semi frictional characters of the buyer.

Buyer Persona

It is defined as the research-based profiling of individual characteristics of your target audience. A Buyer persona is also called a Marketing persona or customer persona. In this digital marketing age, personas play a crucial role in the view of Search Engine Optimization or paid marketing.

Negative Buyer Persona

A Negative persona is also called an “exclusionary persona”. As we know buyer persona is the representation of your targeted ideal customer, the negative persona is the representation of the persons, who you do not need as your customers.

Based on the products or services you offer, you can differentiate your buyer persona and exclusionary persona. For example, you sell luxury cars your customers are filtered based on their income, your customer list may include people willing to buy cars but your specific luxury cars, customers are the people who fall into the defined price range. The other customers not in the range are negative buyer persona for this product.

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Importance of Buyer Persona

Having research-based personas will help businesses to understand the needs and concerns of their audience. This understanding will help them in pitching the right product for the right customer and also for promoting the ideal product or services for customers. Customer Personas will help in identifying your brand voice and also in your content strategy.

Targeting cannot be done unless the Marketing persona is formulated well. Campaign optimization is the advantage of this. Your campaign success depends on your research about your targeted audience and their personas. In order to create stronger personas, market research and insights from the actual customer base through interviews, and surveys will help a lot.

Buyer persona and exclusionary persona are two scenarios that help you to clearly define your target audience for the specific product. Personas are very helpful in training your sales team, you can train your sales team how to pitch, how to communicate, and also the required level of aggression. Types of customer support you provide depend on your customer persona.

Customer persona helps in gauging the needs of customers and also supports the future development of the product. The type of channel preferred by buyers for product delivery plays a crucial role; personas will help you in determining the channel of the product delivery.

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Creating Content Using Buyer Persona:

Persona has a very specific role in content creation. This helps you write a tailored content that matches your customer’s personality, needs, and interests.

Let us see few ways how customer persona can influence your content strategy:

• Picking the right keyword:

Persona helps you in determining the search queries of your ideal customers. This helps you in expanding your keyword generation for not only industry-specific keywords but also other additional keywords for your targeted customer.

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• Social Media Strategy

For effective marketing, you should not only focus on creating good content but also you should focus on publishing and promoting it. Determining your customer’s online behavior, usage of social media channels, time of their presence, will help businesses in generating social media strategy for their targeted customers.

• Website Content

In today’s internet era website is the face of businesses. By taking advantage of buyer’s persona businesses should create their website design and website content. Customize your web content and web design to match the personas of your buyer.

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• Blog Topics:

A customer persona will help in knowing hobbies, interests, online interaction, and other pertinent details of your targeted customers which will help in choosing topics for blogs that interest them. This in turn will help in increasing conversion rates by decreasing bounce rates.

• Content Style and Tone

Style and tone are two important factors for any content. Creating content that exactly suits the customer can be achieved through the personas. For example content for the professional male on his retirement life is different from college entering female teenager. Personas help you in identifying and drafting content accordingly.

Surveys show that having a customized buyer persona increases profit by 20 times than the standard content. In today’s online market scenario developing a detailed and accurate persona that helps in creating great content suitable to the targeted customer has been one of the factors of successful businesses.

Elements in Buyer Persona

While crafting a person certain elements like demographics, behavior, motivations, and goals should be considered. Different businesses have different personas or even the same businesses can have different customer personas.

1. Customer Demographics:

Customer demographics can be defined as the grouping of customers based on certain factors like age, gender, location, education, marital status, occupation, income, etc.

Asking questions like

• What is their age?
• What is their gender?
• What is their marital status?
• Where are they from?
• Where they are presently live?
• What is their Family Format?
• What is the size of the organization they work for?

These are the common demographic elements for researching a customer persona.

2. Behavior Patterns:

If you sell something seasonally or occasionally you should definitely need to know about the purchasing behavior of your targeted customer.

Asking questions like:

• What are websites do they visit?
• What social channels do they use?
• Where do they search for answers?
• What are their Family and work roles?
• What role are they reporting to?
• What are their duties?
• What are the skills required?
• What tools do they use personally and professionally?
• What is their measurement of success?

By researching these types of questions you can determine the behavior of the buyer.

3. Motivations and Goals:

Determine the goals based on the products/services you offer.

Answering questions like:

• What are their personal goals?
• What are their financial goals?
• What are their emotional goals?
• What is their meaning of success for personal goals?
• What is their meaning of success for financial goals?
• What is their meaning of success for emotional goals?
• What are their personal challenges?
• What are their financial challenges?
• What are their emotional challenges?
• What motivates them to buy?

4. Communication and New information:

• Where do they find their vendor?
• What are their ways of communication?
• What are their key phrase questions?
• Describe their most recent purchases?
• What is their source of finding new information?
• What are their biggest objections or obstacles in buying?
• What are their content preferences?
• What are their online or offline networks?
• What is their source of funds?

These types of questions will help in analyzing and understanding the goal-directed personas.

Types of personas:

Personas are mostly defined between B2B (business to business) and B2C (business to client) and also with primary goals and secondary goals.

B2B (Business to Business):

• In this model, companies target other companies here personas are the people who make purchasing decisions.

Let us see an example template of how B2B personas are defined:

Decision maker for marketing agency:

• Basic info:

Name:  Sumit Bhatnagar.

Title:                     Marketing Manager.

Decision-maker: Yes.

Industry:               Marketing.

Age:                        55

Salary:                   5, 50,000/year

Education: Masters in Marketing.

• Detailed Info:

Goals: Increasing content production for the growing client base.

Challenges: spending too much time searching for freelance writers.

Our Help: connecting him with efficient and experienced content writers through our agency platform.

Our strategy: focusing on how to save his time by supplementing his efforts with eligible writers for projects.

B2C (Business to Client):

• In this type, the customer himself wishes to buy to fulfill their own needs.

Let us see an example template of how b2b personas are defined:

Name: Amulya, receptionist:

Age:                35 years.

Gender:          Female

Location:        Agra, India.

Occupation:  receptionist.

Salary:             15k.

Profile:             Narrow Feet.

Motivations:  Fond of shopping for shoes for her narrow feet. Recently she turned from retail shopping to hassle-free online shopping.

Goals:

• Need SS (3a) width shoes.
• Purchases pairs based on style, color, and occasion.
• Not to leave style while searching for a better fit.

Frustrations:

• Unable to get the shoes with narrow width from the available shoes.
• Only fewer options for choosing.
• No recommendations when looking for a particular type of shoes.

These are some of the important points collected by brands like “Munro” as part of their customer persona research. Finally, this brand succeeded in attracting her and marketing their product. Their research-based profiling according to the requirement helped them in understanding their customer needs and marketing accordingly.

These are only some examples, but there is no exact list for selecting, this is because each business will have unique customer personas.

Creating a Buyer Persona:

By creating thorough and detailed customer personas we can drive more sales through marketing campaigns. Let us see some basic things to be considered while creating personas for businesses.

Learning About Your Customers:

Unless you know what makes your customers tick, you cannot create appealing marketing messages nor you can build accurate personas. So understanding and learning about your customers play an important role.

Concrete personas can be created by answering these questions:

• Name of the buyer.
• Age of the buyer.
• Household income of the buyer.
• The lifestyle of the buyer.
• Location of the buyer (urban, suburban, rural).
• Daily spending of the buyer.
• Hobbies of the buyer.
• Leisure activities of the buyer.

Questions related to work:

• Education level of the buyer.
• Type of company do they work for.
• Buyer’s title or role in the company.
• Challenges faced by buyers at work.
• Definition of success in buyer view.
• Career goals of the buyer.
• Fears or pain points of the buyer.
• Common objections of the buyer.
• Our products or services help in solving buyer’s challenges.
• Search options of your buyer.
• A social network of the buyer.
• Preferred mode of communication of your buyer.

These questions may vary from business to business. For example, if your product or service is not involved with technology, avoid asking questions related to their tech experience. Once you are ready with your set of questions related to your product or services finding answers for the same is an easy task.

For Finding Answers:

• A survey from existing customers

By sending questionnaires to your existing customers you will know what makes them tick. You need to convince them by offering small incentives like coupons or free sample products. Their answers are very helpful for your research.

• One-on-one interviews

If your budget permits, investing in one on one interviews with existing customers, will be very helpful in providing data for your buyer persona. The Ability to spot unique challenges, pain points, and motives that are unique for your products or services will have a great impact on choosing the personas.

• Checking Analytics

To know about the insights and demographics like age, gender, location, and devices of the real-time interacting people with your social profiles or websites analytics play an important role.  Anonymous traffic visiting our site can be tracked by tools like Lead Forensics or Lead Feeder.

• Talking to your employees

Employee’s particularly sales teams are the face of the company. While contacting the customers they gather a wealth of information about their personas. Interacting with your employees and running the questionnaires and collating with their answers will help you figure out any new information and adding it.

• Events or Enrichment Programs

These are the most useful tools for gathering data like email addresses or domain names, occupation, and so on… they are very useful in streamlining the process of preparing customer persona and saving time.

These are the simple steps that can be followed while creating your own personas. The most important thing to consider while creating a persona is never to assume. Assumptions can cost you a lot for example, if you guess your customers are millennia’s but actually, they are above thirty, your marketing campaign is a drastic failure because you didn’t target them.

Segmenting Customers:

By now we came to know, answering what type of questions will be helpful in creating personas. Now, let us see how we can group our customers based on their personas.

Let us consider examples to understand this.

Vena is a businesswoman who offers web design services. In her market research for new prospects, she encounters two types of customers.

1. Experienced older management.
2. Upcoming entrepreneurs.

Now, Vena has two different buyer personas for the same service she offers to let us see how she can target two different groups.

1. Experienced older management:

They are the people who are doing business for decades. They are more inclined towards providing excellent service than marketing. These people are less concerned about updating their websites.

Persona for this group follows these:

Take the example of the showroom manager.

Overview:

• Leads a 15 member team in a cloth showroom.
• Completed his master’s degree in management in 2007.

Demographics

• Gender:
• Age:
• Annual Income: Rs 10,00,000/-
• Location: Bangalore

Challenges

• Staff retention.
• Standing out from other recruiting companies.

Fears

• Being fired out is not profitable to the company.
• Losing advisors to competitors.

Goals:

• To find the best candidates for his client.
• To draw a salary of 15,00,000

Hobbies:

• Playing outdoor games
• Motivating team

Common Objections:

• Appreciates modern and responsive websites but budget is not allowed by the boss.

2. Upcoming Entrepreneur

These people are young entrepreneurs and small business owners, they are more tech-savvy and interested in modern and new-look websites. Young and upcoming entrepreneurs are more inclined towards marketing than the bottom line service.

Consider an example of Elite services:

Overview

• Always thinks of new business ideas.
• No full-time staff.
• Owns 2 businesses, still wants to start a new business.

Demographics:

• Gender:
• Age:
• Location:  Kolkata
• Education: Has no formal study.

Challenges:

• Need a new website for each business with a low budget.
• Unsure in finding a genuine web designer for his budget.

Fears:

• Failing as an entrepreneur.
• Running out of budget, by wasting money.

Goals:

• To earn 25.00,000 in the next 5 years.
• To start a restaurant like Udupi.

Hobbies:

• Networking with other entrepreneurs
• Publishing new videos on the idea of his business.

Common Objections:

• Interested in investing in standout websites but, with a low budget.

These are the personas, in which Rena has grouped her customers. By segmenting her customers based on their persona Rena can accurately target her customers. By this splitting, she can easily analyze what type of marketing campaign can attract each of her customers.

Perspectives On personas

Buyer’s personas can be described from 4 different perspectives. They are:

• Role-Based persona.
• Goal-Directed Persona.
• Engaging Persona.
• Fictional Persona.

Role-Based Persona:

This perspective of persona is useful if you’re offering products or services that are based on the role of the person in an organization. In role directed persona we consider factors like

• Work role of the person.
• Duties of the person.
• Business objectives of the person.
• Work-related goals of the person.
• Educational/ training requirement for the role.
• Work activities.
• Work intensity.
• The stress level of their role.
• Their level of collaborations (internally/externally).
• Their work environment.

By answering these types of questions you can get an idea about how and what product or service you can pitch for such type of customers.

Goal-Directed Persona:

The main idea behind this goal-directed persona is to know how the user is going to achieve his end goals and objectives by using your products or services. The main aim of this goal-directed persona is determining the workflow and process that the user follows in achieving his goals by interacting with your products or services.

• What are their motivations?
• What are their frustrations?
• What are their goals?
• What are their challenges?
• What are their pain points?
• What are their skills?

Engaging Persona:

This is the combination of both role-based and goal-directed personas. This persona gives you an all-around picture of the customer. By defining elements like their feelings, background, interests, hobbies, and other factors that are involved in goal-directed and role-based personas we can get a clear picture of the users.

• Interests of the person
• Marital status of the person.
• Family and educational background of the person.
• Hobbies of the person.
• Interests of the person.
• Dislikes of the person.
• Motivations of the person

These are some of the questions that help you in crafting this persona. Along with this information, gathering data related to their goals and roles will help in drafting this type of persona.

Frictional Persona:

These are fictional characters created based on your assumptions and interactions with your customers, and user database. These personas can be considered only for reference but cannot be trusted for the development of your products or services.

Top 9 Tools For Creating Buyer Persona:

1. Make My Persona (Hub Spot).
2. Customer Avatar Worksheet (Digital Marketer).
3. Effective Buyer Persona Template (Filestage).
4. Live Persona (Delve AI).
5. Buyer Persona Template (semrush).
6. Templates by Xtensio.com.
7. Up Close & Persona.
8. Smaply
9. Venngage

Final Words:

Having a target market will have its own benefit but building a persona based on the lifestyle, behavior, interests, motivations, and goals of the customer will surely help in achieving an extra mile for your efforts.