How To Successfully Create A Detailed Buyer Persona For Your Business

How to Create Detailed A Buyer Persona for Your Business… 

Every business and brand has a specific reach and target. 

Knowing your target audience is very important if you want to sell your product or services to those who truly need it. — That is, your ideal customer. 

 

This can be achieved with what is called a buyer persona — which is also known as a customer avatar or audience profile. It is a vital and ever-changing asset that enables you to stay focused on your marketing efforts — ranging from your branding to your social media content to your sales page to your ad targeting, etc. 

 

Sometimes, as a digital marketer, it is easy to get lost in the details of tracking your marketing campaigns and their engagement rates. The customer avatar allows you to put your audience’s wants and needs as a top priority and helps you create content that will be suitable for targeting your ideal customers.

 

Also, a customer persona is not only meant to be used by big companies or organizations. These days, I find the customer persona to be increasingly utilized by small online retailers and service providers. 

 

Now that we understand why we need a customer persona and also know that even you as a small retailer can make use of a customer avatar to better target your ideal customer, — let’s look at what a buyer persona is and how to create one for our business. 

Read also: 10 Best Sales Strategies, and Plans for Your Success

What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is a detailed representation of who your ideal target audience should be. This is usually a fictional representation based on a high level of research of who you have perceived your product or services should be sold to. 

 

The buyer persona usually includes demographic information like gender, age, location, and income, as well as psychographic information like interests and motivations, and concerns in their purchasing decision.

 

In some cases, the buyer persona is also referred to as a customer avatar, audience profile, or marketing persona.

 

Since it is impossible to know all your customers or prospect individually, creating a customer avatar to represent each customer base is very ideal.  Remember that customers buy for different reasons, this means, you will need to create more than one buyer persona to represent every category of customers you will be targeting. 

 

For example, men, women, working category, schooling category, etc. All these buyer personas need to be created separately, to suit each category. 

 

When you create a buyer persona, it is important to give it a name, based on its demographic details, interests, and behavioral traits. You should also add a face using stock photography or illustration to each buyer persona category. Doing this will help you understand your ideal customers; their goals, pain point, and buying patterns. 

 

Always think of your buyer persona as if they were real humans, and you are talking with them — this will help you create a specific marketing message to target each buyer persona. 

 

Creating a detailed buyer persona and keeping them in mind will always help you stay consistent and deliver the best of your product, — starting from product development to sales pitch to social media to how you present every product. 

 

Why You Need a Buyer Persona (The Benefits)

It is easier to sell a product to those who are in need of it than try to convince someone to buy even if they don’t need the product. But how do you really know those who will be interested and truly want to buy what you are selling? This is what your buyer persona helps you achieve. 

 

Digital marketing has evolved over time, — it’s no longer business as usual where you just throw your ads all over the place and people still click and buy from you. It is now more about conveying the right message at the right to the right people. 

 

The buyer persona guides you through your marketing decision and keeps you focused on prioritizing the needs of your target audience above everything else. 

 

It provides a well-guided and easy-to-reference resource for you and your marketing team, — this ensures everyone in the marketing team is on the same page when it comes to making marketing decisions. 

 

So, whenever you want to make a marketing decision or have a new marketing campaign, you already know that you have a clear guide to follow and what to address.

 

If the marketing campaign you or your team have drafted out does not address any issue with the buyer personas you have, then you know you’ll have to reconsider and come up with something better. 

 

With a clear and detailed buyer persona, it will be very easy to create posts and social media content (organic/ads) that directly speaks to the target audience already defined.  

 

Also, you can now use your buyer persona as a guide to developing social content that focuses on your ideal customers to get the right information and result. This is when you start building personal relationships, loyalty, trust, and bonding with real customers. 

Read also: Native Advertising: What The Heck Are Native Advertisements?   

 

Other Things A detailed Buyer Persona Will Do For You:

 

• It ensures your ad copy, creatives, and landing page resonates with your audience

Your sales copy, creatives (graphics), and landing pages are all designed to make your ideal customer take action — making a purchase. If you don’t get it right, your sales will suffer. This is where the buyer persona comes to play. Guiding you through generating copy, creatives, and landing pages that will be interesting, educative, and helpful to your audience 

 

A case study is when your buyer persona targets only ladies, — you should know what type of graphics will sync well with the female gender, the colors that resonate well with them, and the tone of sales copy that will captivate them, including the headline. 

 

• You are intentional about your ad targeting

Now you know who to target, all the guesswork has been taken off.  Testing and retargeting will be less and more focused on generating results. 

 

You will only create a campaign and utilize customer targeting tools that will enable you to tailor your campaign based on your demographic and psychographic traits. 

 

With your paid advertising, you can now easily filter your information based on location, age, language, education level, career, employment status, and interests. This will help you run a cost-effective ad campaign. 

 

• Know the exact marketing channel to use. 

Not every marketing gives you the exact result you wished for. While some may be highly converting, others may not. So, there will be no need for you to be in the marketing trap (trying to be everywhere with your brand) spends.

With your customer avatar, it will be easy to figure out where your target audience spends more of their time. This will help you determine the best channel to use when running your ads. 

 

• Acts as a guide to your marketing team

When you create your buyer persona, it is always great to share it with the rest of the team. If you are the only one in your team with the details of the buyer persona, it makes communication difficult and lags. 

 

When the rest of the team has this document, they are brought up to speed and kept in the know at all times. This will help them know how to market and sell to a customer at every point in time. 

 

It is important to note that your customer persona is an ever-changing tool, — this means that it will keep evolving as time passes by. It is important to be flexible and know when you need to change the details of your buyer persona, especially when it is no longer generating the desired result. 

 

When you initially create your buyer persona, it may be broad containing lots of unwanted details, — however, as you learn more about your ideal customer, you need to refer back to your buyer persona and refine the details, — making it more detailed. 

 

Steps On Creating A Buyer Persona

We already established that the buyer persona, even though it’s fictional, has to be about real humans. This means they should be from real data about real people. And for you to get this data, here are the things you should be doing, especially for your brand. 

1. Carry out an in-depth audience research

The customer avatar is all about your audience (your ideal customer). You should not joke with the research because any wrong detail, will mean, you are targeting the wrong audience in your campaign.

Find out who your existing customers are, your social audience, and who your competitors are targeting. 

 

All of this will help you get the best data for your target audience. You can use tools like the Facebook business suite since it is one of the largest ad networks, or Google Analytics to get the best result. 

 

Here are some key traits that should be included in your buyer persona: 

1. Age: What is their age range?
2. Gender: Are the male or female:
3. Location: Where are they currently?
4. Interests: What do they like, and what is their hobby?
5. Education: What is their level of education?
6. Job title: If they are working, what’s the field and their current position?
7. Challenges: What’s their pain and problem?
8. Income: What’s their salary range?
9. Relationship status: Are they married or single?
10. Language: What’s the primary language? 
11. Favorite social media: Which social media platform do they mostly use?
12. Social accounts they follow:  Who are they following on social media?
13. Favorite websites: Where do they gather online?
14. Buying motivations: Why do they buy online?
15. Buying concerns: What will stop them from buying?

 

All of these are the common traits of a buyer persona. However, you don’t necessarily need to answer all of this in your customer avatar. It all depends on the nature of the customer avatar and what is required for the result. The most important thing is knowing who your ideal customers are, so you easily relate with them and also sell to them.

 

2. Identify the customer goals and pain points

What is the goal of your customer, and what is their pain point? Knowing their pain point and goal plays a key role in creating a sale copy that will be suitable for them. 

 

Remember, their goal may differ based on personal, business, or professional attributes, — depending on the nature of your product. Identify the category of your customers, what motivates them to buy, and what their end game is. 

 

The problem of every customer is the reason why they buy. Finding out your customer’s problem or pain point will help you know what they are trying to achieve/solve. It will also allow you to understand why they are unable to achieve results and the barriers they face in trying to reach their goal. 

 

All of this will help you create a great marketing campaign that will drive the best result. 

 

3. Find out how to help

Selling is about helping people achieve the desired result. People are always searching the web, looking for solutions to one problem or the other. If you can position yourself as a problem-solver, it will help a lot in your marketing process.

 

With your customer avatar, you now have key information about your ideal customer, — this includes their struggles, problems, and pain point. All you need to do is to figure out a way to help them. This goes beyond laying out the features and benefits of your product. 

 

Find out why a customer will not buy and the purchasing barrier, also, figure out where your customers are in their buying journey. With all of this figured out, ask yourself: How do I help them overcome all these challenges, and try to capture that in a clear sentence.  

 

4. Creating your buyer personas

With all that you have gathered during your research, it is time to create your buyer persona. Put all characteristics into a group as you deem fit. 

Now that you have all of that and have also put all details in groups and subgroups, be sure to name your buyer persona. 

 

You could name your buyer persona based on gender, location, job title, and other defining traits. This will help make your buyer persona feel more real and personal. 

 

Buyer Persona Example

Here is an example. Let’s say you have identified your ideal customer, and she is 30 years old, married with kids, working, and lives in the city. And she loves traveling. Here is what your buyer persona would look like

 

1. Age: She is 30 years old
2. Gender: She is a woman
3. Location: She lives in Ikeja, Lagos
4. Interests: She loves traveling, and loves singing 
5. Education: She is a graduate
6. Job title: Works with XYZ company as the human resource manager. 
7. Challenges: Wants to lose belly fat
8. Income: #200,000 to #350,000
9. Relationship status: Married with kids
10. Language: Speaks English
11. Favorite social media: Uses Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram a lot
12. Social accounts they follow: She follows XYZ on FB and ABC on Instagram 
13. Favorite websites: Legit, Pulse NG, LindeIkeji, Bellanaija, Nairaland
14. Buying motivations: below are the top 5 reasons why people buy online.

• The desire for gain, trying to increase or grow in some way.
• Comfort and convenience.
• Security and protection.
• Pride of ownership.
• Satisfaction of emotion.

    15. Buying concerns: Fear of loss, price, time of delivery.  

 

Now you see how simple and clear a buyer persona can be. It is well-detailed about your future potential buyer and allows you to put them first in your marketing strategy and how you can help them even as they buy your product. 

 

Although, this data may not fit every customer in your audience, however, it presents you with reasonable data to work with. 

 

Do You Need Multiple Buyer Personas?

Creating multiple buyer personas depends on the nature of your product. If your brand has products for different categories of users, then you’ll need to create different buyer personas for each category. 

 

You can generate as many buyer personas as you wish for your brand. The most important thing is tracking and making sure they are all converting. 

Monitor closely how your audience responds to each campaign based on the buyer persona, measure how much it costs to acquire each user in each category, and how much revenue they bring in. These will help you decide whether to dump a campaign or continue running it.

 

What If You Don’t Know Your Target User?

There are cases when you don’t even know your target audience. This usually happens with new businesses. In such a scenario. Here are some things you should do. 

 

• Use Google to search for your competitors and find out what they are doing and who they are marketing to. 
• Use social media like Facebook to find a competitor’s product or similar product in the same category. It is free to follow and like their pages. Also joining their Instagram handle and follow them on Twitter and other social media. Monitor their followers closely, and you will find your target audience. 
• You could also look for someone who loves what you are selling (this may be someone who has bought your product) Ask them a few questions or send them a survey. 

Read also: 15 Effective offline marketing ideas for startups in Africa 

 

Conclusion

Customer avatar or buyer persona is a tool every business owner must have if they want to get their marketing right and drive more sales. It is the foundation of successful Digital Marketing Campaigns (DMC). 

 

It helps you maximize your return on investment (ROI), especially when you are investing heavily in digital paid advertising. Having a clear picture of the customers you want to target before investing in paid ads will help you filter out those who will not be interested in your product. Because, selling to everyone is not selling to anyone — as not everyone on the internet will be interested in your product. 

 

Hope you are able to create your own buyer persona using the strategy I share in the post.