Branding by Ash (Part 3): Buyer Persona
We’ve now reached the third and final entry in the Branding by Ash series. This entry, on Buyer Personas, and while I was a bit surprised, I think this was the most interesting one to write about. Remember, you can find all of these on Ashley Hoffman’s website! Be sure to give her a visit!
The Buyer Persona and You
By now, you’re likely familiar with what a buyer persona is if you’ve been in Marketing for any stretch of time. Still, a refresher is never a bad thing. According to Hubspot, in short a Buyer Persona is “a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.”
Creating a Buyer Persona doesn’t necessarily have to be an intense ordeal, but the more data and thought you put into crafting them, the more reliable your moves based off of them will be.
That’s why I thought Ashley did a great job with her Buyer Persona worksheet. I thought it went into a lot of depth with questions that really made me think and realistically color the decisions my ideal customer might take.
My Buyer Persona
Now, obviously you can (and should) have multiple Buyer Personas, because you’re going to want to Market to (and likely) for a variety of people. For this exercise though, we’ll be focusing on my sole current Persona. We’ll call her Jackie.
To start, here are some of the questions from the workbook, and my answers about Jackie:
- How do they feel about their career?
- How would others describe them?
- What are their concerns (related to your product/service?)
Jackie is a bit nervous about her artistic career and about her work. As a wife, mother, and neighborhood friend, people consider her responsible, and someone that you can turn to if you need to talk about anything over a cup of tea (or something stiffer.)
Her concerns are varied, and include not really knowing how to connect with her audience or where they come from and what exactly I have to offer her.
These are some tough questions, that took me a substantial amount of time to answer from the place of someone much different than myself. However, because of that, I’m quite confident in those answers and the answers to Jackie’s concerns.
The Best Buyer Personas…
Come from a combination of research and hard data, and there are many ways to come across the information you want. As Ashley states in the document:
Find a few people to ask these questions to in order to get feedback from real people, rather than just guessing.
If you’ve been in business for some time, reach out to your best clients and customers and ask them if they’d be willing to help you by answering a few questions.
The real data from customers can prove invaluable to the process of figuring out what future customers might want and need from you. This also helps the process of getting an outside perspective from yourself into the mix, which can be difficult working solo.
With that said, I hope you’ll take the time to really give these questions some thought. It might be a bit of a pain at first, but it can only help you in the long run.
Buyer Persona — Conclusion
That brings us to the end of our Branding by Ash saga, but that doesn’t have to be the end of everything. Ashley Hoffman is a veteran Marketer, with a number of certifications that makes her perfect for a variety of jobs that you may need. She was the brains behind all of the featured documents we’ve discussed and no-doubt has much more to teach people who are interested in her help.
And with that, we move forward. They’ll be an announcement on Twitter later this week on the next topic of discussion for the JO1KP blog, so be sure to follow me and stay tuned!
Welcome to the new home of the Journey of 1000 Posts! Due to limitations on my hosts’ website service, this will be where we continue our journey. You can still read the previous entries in this series as well as general posts from my website through this link!
