How to better understand your customers: creating a Buyer Persona
One of the first questions you should ask yourself before launching your startup is “who is your target?”.
Seems like a simple question, but it isn’t, there’s a lot of people out there that don’t know the answer or what is worse, their answer is “EVERYONE” 👈 this is a straight path to failure. “Jack of all trades, master of none” they say…
Please, devote adequate time to customer discovery, it’s not only a marketing thing, everyone in your team should know who your customers are.
What is a buyer persona and why you should you create one
A persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer, including as many details as possible so you can view your product or service through their eyes. All these details should be based on market research and real data from your customers.
You can have a great idea but if you don’t connect with your customers, it doesn’t have any value, and the only way to connect with them is to understand their behaviour, their motivations, who they are… like in every relationship, you have to listen to them to be able to make them happy.
Even though you think your product is amazing and that people should love it at first sight, this, like in real love stories, hardly never happens, you need to prove you are worth it to make people love you.
Be aware that your audience is constantly bombarded with other brand’s messages… and what’s worse… you also have to compete with their friends and family holiday pictures, their neighbour’s cute dog who has a lovely instagram account, and with all those hypnotic videos of nasty recipes from Tasty… how can you stand out in this messy environment without knowing deeply your customers? It’s impossible.
This is not the only reason why you should create your buyer persona, it also:
- Helps you maintain focus.
- Helps with your brand definition.
- Makes your marketing efforts more effective.
- Makes your content strategy successful.
- Helps attracting the most valuable leads.
Should you create only one Buyer Persona?
It depends on your product/service, if you feel you need to distinguish between two or three different kinds of customers, that’s perfectly alright, create those 2 or 3 personas. But only if you are able to take care of all of them.
What you need to define to start creating your persona
As we said before, you need to include as many details as possible, so take a cup of coffee or tea and start answering this questions:
Facts & demographics:
These can help you contextualize your customers life, it also helps with your marketing campaigns.
- Name (they say this is useful to humanize your character, you can also add a picture of him/her to make it more real… it’s up to you).
- Gender
- Age
- Location
- Education level
- Occupation
- Income level
Behaviour:
Knowing where they are and what they like to reach them easily and give them what they want.
- What websites/blogs they follow
- Social media accounts they follow
- Influencers they like
- Social Media platforms they use
- Events they attend
- Can you find them anywhere else (online / offline)
- Their interests
- Their hobbies
Problems, needs, goals, motivators and dreams:
If they feel you understand their feelings or that you are offering exactly what they need to achieve their goals or solve their frustrations they will listen to you, so dig deeply into this.
- Do they use any product or service similar to yours? Why? What for?
- What exactly are they trying to accomplish?
- What worries them?
- What matters to them?
- Which obstacles prevent them from achieving their goals.
- Is there any difference between what they say and what they really think?
- Are they afraid of taking risks?
This is a good start point to get familiar with your buyer persona, but don’t forget you should always keep digging into your customers minds.
Which tools can you use to answer all these questions?
- Google Analytics: This tool can give you very useful information about who is interested in your product. If you don’t have a website with traffic yet, leave this step to a later step of your startup.
- Facebook Insights: Exactly the same, Facebook gives you really powerful information about who is following your page. You can also use Facebook Audience Insights , provide the information you have and see more information about the people who meet that criteria.
- Google Trends: Google Trends is a powerful tool, not only to know the latest trends on what people are “googling”, you can also extract some facts about your audience searching different keywords and seeing related searches or the demographic data of the people interested on that.
- Your competitors: Don’t know who your target is? Select 2–3 competitors and analyse their audience!
- Forums, Facebook groups, Linkedin groups: Bring out the stalker you have inside! In these groups you can see how people react, how they feel, what they say… here you have a perfect scenario to listen to your potential customers.
- Analyse social profiles: Now that you are a recognized stalker (😂), you can also identify social profiles of your customers and analyse their behaviour.
- Personal Interviews: If you are in a pre launch stage you are surely going to do some interviews to validate your assumptions, so use this interviews to also create your buyer persona, there’s not a better way than asking real people.
Some useful resources to build your personas:
You don’t really need more than a pen and a paper to create your buyer persona but if you want inspiration or a bit of help with the design check out this tools:
Now that you have a carefully defined buyer persona, imagine you want to be friends with this person, how would you do it? think about that!
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