What is Buyer Persona and How to Develop One? A Beginners Guide

You might have heard of Buyer Persona on several occasions if you are into digital or content marketing. It’s also a very common word used in educational courses, materials, and articles related to marketing.

A Buyer Persona is an imaginary representation of your customer or prospective customer. It is a profile of your customer that is built based on research and existing data. It describes your ideal customer's thought process, challenges that he/she faces, his/her decision-making process, etc.

Alan Cooper first introduced the concept of Buyer Persona in the 90s.

It is also called audience persona, marketing persona, or customer persona.

It has now become an important part of marketing because businesses need to build and develop products or services that solve customers’ issues to achieve success

Why do you need a buyer persona?

• To attract the right customers who can make a financial transaction with you, i.e., better quality leads or sales.
• Make sales teams focus more on leads that align with your persona characteristics.
• Enhance your marketing efforts
• Create goodwill among customers.
• Make your business stand out from your competitors.

Why buyer persona is essential?

• It aids in understanding your customers in a better way
• Helps businesses target the right customers
• To tailor products or services that solve problems
• Understand the challenges
• Understand the behavior patterns of your typical customers
• Assists product development teams in decision making

Let’s see with an example

You are a manufacturer of automotive spare parts, and you know who your target customers are.

Your target customer could be a repair shop owner, a mechanic, or even an individual. But still, you are completely unaware of which car or bike spare parts your target customers are looking for. So here, the Buyer Persona comes into the picture.

How buyer persona can be used in marketing?

It allows you to develop relevant content that interests your customers. Personalized content increases engagement rate, makes content appealing, enhances relationships, drives customers to make purchases, and creates unique experiences.

Moreover, you can segment your buyer persona and send tailored emails or messages accordingly.

You can create a negative persona to remove potential prospects that are unlikely to purchase from your contact list to save your budget. It also facilitates you to focus on genuine prospects that eventually lead to achieving higher sales.

What is a Negative Buyer Persona?

It is again an imaginary representation of who you do not want to be your customer.

It is also called an exclusionary persona.

For example, you own an institute that offers advanced software training. And, you do not want to train students who are new to the field as your training doesn’t suit a newbie.

How do I create a buyer persona?

Before creating a buyer persona, you need certain characteristics like demographics, values, pain points, challenges, etc., that must be added to a buyer persona profile.

Demographics

• Age
• Gender
• Income level
• Location
• Education
• Family status

Professional status

• Job title
• Level of the profession (manager, team leader, executive, etc)
• Industry

Psychographics

• Interests
• Values and beliefs
• Goals
• Standpoints

Buying decisions

• The role of persona in decision making
• How frequently a person makes a purchase
• Issues that prevent them from making a purchase

Pain points

• Challenges
• Obstacles
• Fears

Factors that influence a persona

• Websites and blogs they read
• Social media platforms
• Influencers
• Conferences and events

As said earlier, you can develop a persona by looking at existing data, questionnaires, surveys, interviews, etc.

Also, include your details of existing customers, prospective customers, and others who might be interested in your product or service in the process of developing a buyer persona.

Talk to your customer and take feedback to know which factors triggered them to make a purchase.

You can also collect feedback from:

• Referrals
• Third-party networks
• Prospects
• Surveys

Having a conversation with an unsatisfied customer brings out new points that help build a perfect persona. Perhaps they have difficulties in using your product or they are expecting more benefits from a particular product.

This helps in finding your customer pain points and challenges that are highly valuable.

By following the above-mentioned points, you will get some raw data. The data collected may look messy so filter the raw data to make it easily understandable.

Search for common characteristics and group them together. Pick at least one persona if you cannot find many similar characteristics.

Now, turn those characteristics into personas.

For example,

You are the owner of a saloon. You identified a group of customers, mothers in their 30s, who live in cosmopolitan cities. They like visiting salons to get a facial, a massage, or a hair dye.

Here, their requirements are different. So you have to create separate personas based on their requirements.

Give your persona some characteristics like name, age, number of kids, city, challenges, interests, pain points, and goals.

Make your persona appear like a real person to develop personalized content.

You can also represent your persona with a picture.

Example,

Name: Scarlet

No of kids: 2

Education: MBA

She lives in New York

Visits beauty salons

Likes and shares content related to beauty on social media platforms

Looking for a job in the future

And so on.

An entity can have any number of persons. It could have two personas or even fifteen personas.

Once you are done with creating a buyer persona, start developing content by targeting specific behaviors.

As you keep adding new customers to the database, align their characteristics with your buyer persona, or create a new one.

Get a free buyer persona template.

You can access it here (offered by Hubspot):

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