Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Buyer Persona for your Business for Growth.
As a content creator for a brand or business, it is easy to get lost in the process of tracking engagement metrics. Creating Buyer personas has become a fixture in marketing because it streamlines the process of marketing and content creation.
A Buyer Persona is a fictional representation or template representing an ideal customer of your business or brand based on research. Buyer Personas are a representation of your target audience or target market.
To create a buyer persona, you have to understand who your audience is, what they want, what problems are they looking to solve, what their goals and motivations are, what their challenges are, and how you can solve their problems using your products or services.
To create the content your audience will like, you have to understand them and appeal to them. You have to create a fictional person in a way that feels like you know them.
Buyer Personas will help provide answers to the following questions:
- What problems would your customers want you to solve, and how does your business or brand provide a solution to the problem?
- How does your potential customer prefer to engage in sales?
- What type of content would likely generate engagement from your potential customers?
Why are Buyer Personas Important to your Business or Brand?
Buyer personas are a guide to help ensure all business or brand activities are suited to the potential customer’s needs. To better understand the benefits of creating a persona for your business or brand, below are the top benefits of having a persona:
- Increase in conversions — Creating a persona will give a better view of how your potential customer thinks. Once you understand that, creating and marketing the right content will increase conversions.
- A better understanding of your potential customer — Before you can attract your potential customers, you have to understand them. A buyer persona provides the authentic and easiest way to do so.
- Segmented Marketing — If your business or brand provides options for solutions, directing all content may not be beneficial. With the insights you gather from your buyer persona, you can segment the marketing to suit the categories of potential customers.
- Product Development — The insights you gain from your research into what your potential audience likes can help you prioritize the changes they want to see. Your product or service may be a solution but not the desired amount.
- Focus on business growth — Understanding your customers gives you the advantage of focusing on the content that drives customer and business growth. A buyer persona will also help narrow your focus on who to target as a customer.
How to Create Buyer Personas
Creating a buyer persona involves a straightforward method. With time, you can make changes to the process as you want or as your business or brand experiences growth. For the first time, we have broken down the process of creating a buyer persona for you.
Step 1: Research your Buyer Personas
Research is the foundation of getting accurate information. If you had previous information about your potential customers; engaging in robust customer research can cement your knowledge base. You can carry out customer research using the template below:
- Who is buying from you?
This information is paramount as it sheds light on your existing customer base. You can gather the answer to this question by using the available data from Facebook and Instagram Insights, Google Analytics (for your website), social media advertising tools such as Meta ads manager, and other analytic tools used in gathering data. You can narrow in on details such as:
- Age
- Marital Status
- Gender
- Location
- Language
- Challenges
- Interests and Hobbies
- Communication Preferences
- Spending power or income
- Job Title
- Career Path
For B2B, you could adjust the details to the following:
- Size of Business
- Industry
As an alternative, visit forums and blogs to see the conversation surrounding your product or service.
Consider sending out surveys and questionaries that can be anonymously answered. In exchange, you can give out a small incentive.
You can also conduct research by conducting face-to-face interviews with your existing customers. Preferably, the best set of interviewees should be one of the following:
- People who have bought from you before.
- People who have come close to buying from you but never did.
- People who choose to buy from your competitors instead.
Because these sets of people have gone through the buying process, they can provide unbiased opinions on what they chose or did not choose to buy your product or service.
2. Who would like to purchase from you?
Once you have gathered adequate data from your existing customers, think about who would like to buy from you in the future. Are there areas that your marketing strategy has yet to shed light on to attract potential customers? What strategies are your competitors employing to attract their customers?
Using the above-highlighted strategies will point you in the right direction regarding who your buyer persona is during research. It is a well-known fact that the research process may be time-consuming and tedious. This step is crucial and must be treated as so to get accurate information for your business or brand growth.
Step 2: Compile Data and Segment Your Buyer Personas
Now that you have done the most crucial step, you organize the collected data next. Before segmenting your data, you should have learned a lot about your existing and potential customers and will be able to pick out similarities between them. The Similarities will help you group your customers into sets of buyer personas.
You can segment your buyer personas into the following:
- By Industry
- By Interests
- By Job Title
Segmenting your customers into these categories will help you understand their disparate pain points and challenges. This is especially important if you have a variety of products and services.
Step 3: Create a Profile for Each Segment of Buyer Personas
To better understand your buyer persona create a profile that describes your ideal customer. You can start your profile by giving your buyer persona a name. This will make them less fictional and make you relate with them as humans. When you have chosen a name, start writing down everything about the buyer persona. The information can contain the following:
- The age of your persona
- A profile picture
- Where they live
- Their career goals
- Their pain points and challenges
Here are a few examples of buyer personas you might like.
The above samples can be used in creating a persona for your business or brand.
Although creating a buyer persona can be tricky, trying is not a bad idea. Buyer personas are a quick way to gain insights into what your business or brand needs to grow.
I wish you the best as you create your first buyer persona and set your business or brand on a growth path.
