How to find and develop your Buyer Personas

In order to market to someone, you need to know who that person is. It just makes sense that successful marketing requires a close knowledge of the people who are likely to receive your marketing message. This is where buyer personas come in.  A major component of marketing campaigns involves detailed studies of the kinds of people who are likely to be well-disposed toward a specific brand, product, or service. Part of how this is done is by developing buyer personas.  Buyer personas are hypothetical, but well-researched, targets for a marketing and advertising campaign. Companies develop buyer personas to create profiles of who might buy their product or service. In essence, buyer personas are the ideal targets for your marketing efforts, complete with the skepticism that is built into the contemporary consumer.   What is a buyer persona? Why are buyer personas important? How do you create a buyer persona? And what can you achieve with buyer personas? This guide will give the basic information on buyer personas. 

What Is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer person a profile that is developed using research into the target audience and customer base for a given product or service. Buyer personas represent your ideal customers. In developing a buyer persona, you develop a profile of what your ideal customer is like what their days consist of, the kinds of challenges they face, and how these things are likely to influence their shopping and spending decisions.  Marketing professionals commonly develop multiple buyer personas. For example, if part of the buyer's experience is to gain approval from others, the buyer personas may include a social arrangement of potential personas that impact these kinds of decisions. Each individual buyer persona will represent various pieces of a larger social puzzle.  Buyer personas are often called customer or marketing personas or profiles. In any case, buyer personas help companies understand their potential customer base, and form a more personal relationship with their customer base. 

Why Are Buyer Personas Important?

Buyer personas ideally make it possible to better understand your customers and to tailor your marketing and your product or service to their needs and desires. A product or service is meaningless if no one wants or needs them. Buyer personas allow you to develop your product, service, and marketing toward something that will be perceived as beneficial by customers.  This sounds simple enough, but there is more to this than meets the eye. This means you must develop both your brand and your marketing with a deep understanding of customer needs and desires. The issue is not what you can do. It is what your customer can gain.  Nearly everyone who shops online does research on products and services before they buy. This means customers are knowledgeable and it also means they are sophisticated in what they are looking for. To gain the trust of customers, you must present your brand in a way that fits into what they know. This means you need to understand them from within their experiences and lives.  Developing research-based buyer personas allows you to look at your own product or service from the perspective of your potential customer base. It makes little difference that you are proud of your product or service. What matters is that potential customers come to trust your product or service. To learn how to gain the trust of customers, you need to develop buyer personas. 

How Are Buyer Personas Used?

To build a buyer persona, you need to begin with an extensive exploration of who your ideal customer is. This means developing ideas that are not always obvious. Sometimes the process of developing a buyer persona means using everyone in your company and not just the marketing people. This ensures that all potential possibilities are brought to the table.  Once you have come up with an idea of who your ideal customer might be, you can begin a marketing strategy based on a buyer persona. This will involve:  Product development with this buyer persona in mind. Rather than developing what would be an ideal product for people like engineers, technicians, and graphic designers, your product will begin to look like something your buyer persona would find interesting. This is one of the key uses of a buyer persona.   Create marketing strategies based on the buyer persona. This means crafting keywords and social references that are appealing and interesting to your buyer persona. This will lead to the crafting of copy and promotional material specifically geared toward your buyer persona.  By using insights gained with the creation of a buyer persona, sales and marketing teams can determine strategies to reach customers personally. The buyer persona has traits, interests, and concerns that are shared with your customers. With these insights, your sales and marketing team can speak to customers in a way that is meaningful. The sales and marketing language contains messages and ideas that are useful to your customers.  Since you ideally understand what brings customers to you in the first place, customer service can be more effective and useful to the customer. This helps build long-term relationships with your customers, and it establishes trust and authority in your company. And in the event of an unhappy customer, you have the information you need to reach them and assuage their concerns. 

Creating your own Buyer Personas

Once you have an understanding of what it means to develop a buyer persona, you can start taking steps to put this place. Some of the steps to create a buyer persona include: 

Learn About your Customer (Audience Research)

Learning what you can about your customer base means identifying an audience through research. You can compile data about your audience from things like social media analytics. Facebook Insights is a great example of these kinds of analytics. You should also make use of customer databases from Google Analytics. The kinds of things you need to grasp include:

• Age
• Location
• Language
• Spending power and patterns
• Interests
• Challenges
• Stage of life
• For B2B: The size of businesses and who makes purchasing decisions

This is also the stage when you determine which social media channels you need to target. There are more research tools that can help with this step. You can find your target audience by using tools like Google Analytics and HootSuite Insights. 

Identify customer goals and pain points

Another important set of information is your target audience’s goals. What are they trying to accomplish in their online shopping searches? You need to figure out what their motivations are. For example, are they looking to satisfy a need, or are they looking for entertainment and diversion?  The other side of this is your audience's dislikes or pains. What puts them off? What kinds of things constitute a hassle or too much trouble for them? Knowing these kinds of things can make it easier for you to streamline their online experience with your website and with your product or service.   You can also look at the kinds of things people are saying about your company online. This is some of the best feedback you can get. Remember, this is all actionable information. It allows you to better understand your customers and their points of identification and resistance.  To help with this step, there is analytics available like social media sentiment analysis that provides real data to help understand customers' motivations.

How can I help them?

Once you have a good understanding of customer goals and their concerns, you can find ways to anticipate their ideas. One of the best ways to formulate your buyer persona is as a customer whose needs you already know how to meet. What you need to make the focus of your marketing strategies are the ways your product or service meets the needs and concerns you know about, and also ways to head-off problems your customers may have experienced in the past. The ideal buyer persona is one who embodies all your customers' wants, needs, and even struggles. 

Buyer Persona Examples

Below are two examples of buyer personas that could come from the correct research and teamwork: #1 Business to customer: General background: Single mother. Balancing a career and family. Educated. Extremely busy and relies on online sources to manage much of her life—from meal planning to issues pertaining to children.  Goals: Keeping her family healthy. In the event of a problem, she demands fast and effective answers.  Challenges: Does not have a designated physician for her children. Worries about medical bills in the event of a crisis.  How we can help: Provide online scheduling and same-day visits for medical issues. Care locations are accessible to her home and her office. Can offer online health resources.  #2 Business to business: Career-oriented professional woman who manages a small marketing firm.  Goals: To increase efficiency and profits while bringing her personal workload under control.  Challenges: Day-to-day management is compromised by daily tasks that arise with a rising company. Some of the management software seems out of date. Feels like she takes on more than she should.  How we can help: Software development that brings all management tasks under one system. She can see daily workload without needing to jump from one system to another. Consulting services help pinpoint areas of inefficiency and bottlenecks. Increase efficiency for project management. 

Buyer Personas FAQS

What Is a Buyer Persona? A buyer person a profile that is developed using research into the target audience and customer base for a given product or service. Buyer personas represent your ideal customers. In developing a buyer persona, you develop a profile of what your ideal customer is like what their days consist of, the kinds of challenges they face, and how these things are likely to influence their shopping and spending decisions.  Why Are Buyer Personas Important? Buyer personas ideally make it possible to better understand your customers and to tailor your marketing and your product or service to their needs and desires. A product or service is meaningless if no one wants or needs them. Buyer personas allow you to develop your product, service, and marketing toward something that will be perceived as beneficial by customers.  How Are Buyer Personas Used? To build a buyer persona, you need to begin with an extensive exploration of who your ideal customer is. This means developing ideas that are not always obvious. Sometimes the process of developing a buyer persona means using everyone in your company and not just the marketing people. This ensures that all potential possibilities are brought to the table.  What are key features to understand about customers for creating a buyer persona? Age, location, language, spending power, and patterns, interests, challenges, stage of life Creating a buyer persona is an essential step in developing an effective marketing strategy. It is just not enough to offer a good product or service. You need to anticipate what customers need and want and find ways to convey to them that you know how to meet their needs.  As you can see, creating a buyer persona is not just a useful feature of marketing strategy, it is perhaps an essential component of how to present your business online. Customers are extremely sophisticated in what they are looking for and creating a buyer persona is an integral part of how you present yourself online.  HeyDay Marketing Services provides sound strategies for creating buyer personas and how to integrate them into an overall marketing strategy that works.   HeyDay Marketing Services can help you create buyer personas that will boost your brand in ways that create a positive image for your business online. Our professional consultants understand how to use the latest research and analytic tools that can create buyer personas that represent the precise market you need to target.  HeyDay Marketing Services offers several packages for you to find the marketing and advertising campaign that works for your company. We understand that one size does not fit all. For sound public relations strategies that work, allow HeyDay Marketing Services to take over the public relations for your business.