It’s often a challenge for businesses to reach their target audience. Fortunately, there are multiple marketing strategies that you can optimize. And, one of them is creating a buyer persona. But what is a buyer persona, how do you make one, and how can this help you succeed in marketing? Let’s find out.

Marketing is one of the most important activities of a business. Once you get the gears going in your production and finances, it’s time to sell your brand and make some money. Regardless of how good your product is, if you can’t market it well, then you are highly likely going to nosedive.

To avoid such demise, there are multiple marketing strategies that you can perform. This ensures that your efforts will not only be successful but also effective at yielding sales. Speaking of strategies, one way to ensure traditional or digital marketing success is identifying your target audience.

In marketing, knowing your target audience plays a crucial role in delivering your business message. By tapping the right demographic, you’ll make sure that your efforts will reach the audience they’re meant for.

There are multiple ways to identify your target audience for your marketing efforts. Some of these include defining your industry, reviewing your current customer base, checking your competitors, and more. Aside from these, you can also opt to create a buyer persona.

What is a Buyer Persona?

You may or may not have heard of this term before. Regardless, this element is key to successfully identifying a target audience. Put simply, a buyer persona is a detailed profile that describes a target customer.

This means that a company creates a semi-fictional person who possesses their target audience’s characteristics in the market. These characteristics may include age group, lifestyle, interests, gender, hobbies, and more.

Knowing the details about your buyer persona and their lifestyle is an essential factor in identifying your target audience. This gives you better insights and understanding of your customers so you can sell your product or service better. For example, you can improve content creation by broadcasting the types of posts that attract your buyer profile.

Additionally, this improves other aspects of marketing such as product development, branding, and, most importantly, customer retention. Now, let’s talk about the steps to creating a buyer persona.

How to Create a Buyer Persona?

What makes a buyer persona so important is it helps you better understand your customers. This will also be very useful once you try and fill out your buyer persona template.

For example, you may already know that your customers are contractors, but you still don’t quite know what they need. Creating a buyer persona allows you to dig deeper and understand that customer better to create a profile. That profile will be your guide to improve your overall marketing strategies.

While this process incorporates many aspects of customer information, there are integral points that you can take. Here are the key steps to effectively create a buyer persona.

1. Research your persona

First and foremost, data is important. You’ll get to know your buyer persona through research and data gathering. These apply to the following steps that we are going to discuss.

The essence of research is you need real-world data to formulate the profile of your buyer. You don’t just define a fictional character, proceed with marketing, and hope for the best. That just simply won’t cut it. You will be more successful if you use actual data from people and customers rather than just gut feeling. By doing so, you will set more realistic expectations and results.

Additionally, researching your target audience may help you gather the information that you might have overlooked. Look into key details like how they found your business or what factors made them into customers. These pieces of information will help you narrow down the common denominators on the behavior and demographic of your persona.

2. Define your customer’s basic demographic information

Alongside research and data gathering is interviewing your customers. You can perform these interviews through phone calls, surveys, online forms, or even personal engagement. This step is necessary to fill out the buyer persona template to reference the fundamental details about your persona.

These details mainly entail demographic information about your customers. Here are some of the things that you can include in your interview questions.

• Background information. This would indicate your persona’s livelihood and resources. Some examples include their job descriptions, educational background, and personal goals.
• Demographics. This portion would include demographic information of your customers. Ask them about their gender, age, location, income level, educational attainment, and preferences (veganism, cruelty-free, etc.)
• Behavior. Customer behaviors may not be directly answered in interviews. However, it can be done through observation on their attitude towards the interview. How did they answer your questions? Are they prompt and enthusiastic? Did they show more calmness and temperament? While these traits are observable in person-to-person contact, you may also observe patterns for written responses. These can be indicated through their answer’s length, writing style, and even punctuations.

3. Ask questions about your persona and summarize

To further analyze their responses, you need to ask more in-depth questions with more detailed answers. This is where you will ask the whys. You need to know why they’re using your product or why they’re looking for such a product.

Some sample questions include:

• What problem are they trying to solve?
• What are their other interests?
• Why do they encounter such a problem?
• What are their primary motivations?
• What else could the product/service have and why do they want it?
• Why are their motivations so?
• What can I do to help them solve their problem?
• What can I do to motivate them to make a purchase?

By asking these questions, you will get an insight into your customer’s motivations in their willingness to make a purchase. Once you have collated the answers, you need to find patterns and commonalities to narrow your persona’s profile.

4. Curate your marketing message for your buyer persona

From the demographic information and the series of questions, you’ll get to find the common denominators of your persona. You can draw a profile for this persona, and then you’ll get to know who this person is. Ultimately, you can now curate your marketing message for that persona.

As an example, your persona is a woman in her mid-30s, Caucasian, and a full-time housewife with three children. Let’s call her Katya. She likes to watch reality TV shows and has just recently turned vegan. Katya prefers to go grocery shopping using her reusable bag and has rejected the use of plastic ever since. The question now is how you will convince Katya to patronize your reusable bags over the others?

Now, it’s up to you to answer that. You just need to make sure that you convey it to match the persona’s needs. They should be motivated to use your product or services because of the marketing message crafted to match their information.

In addition, you can create multiple personas based on the volume of commonalities and patterns in your research. This allows you to expand your marketing message and reach a wider audience within your target market.

In summary: Research and Organize

Essentially, creating a buyer persona is just a two-step process. First, do your research and data collection. Then, organize those chunks of information to create one profile or more. Mastering this process will elevate your marketing edge against your competitors.

At Full Scale, we take marketing seriously. In fact, our marketing team is equipped with highly talented professionals that can curate different types of content material for essentially different audiences. We want you to have that, too!

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