Buyer Persona is a term that has been used quite often by people trying to design their marketing strategies.
Or businesses trying to re-design their approach to connect to their consumers.
But if you are someone who is just trying to understand what this term means, or trying to understanding the implications behind its usage, then this post is perfect for you!
Also Includes A Buyer Persona Template At The End Of The Post
1. What are Buyer Personas?
Simply put, a Buyer Persona is a research-based profile of your target audience.
These define and describe the likes, dislikes, and overall personality of your consumer.
The word, Buyer Persona is also derived from this same meaning of ‘Personality of the Buyer’
Buyer Personas help a business understand its customers better and empathize with them so that the products offered by the business seem to be the right fit.
It also helps you in understanding the customer psychology that is so very important when deriving a marketing strategy.
And more so, given the fact that the psychological understanding of consumers is not easy to get, Buyer Persona acts like a great way to get the information.
But, we are not talking about a one-dimensional profile, it has to take into account multiple things, and should also include a map to the journey of the buyer.
There can be multiple buyer personas for a business especially when you know that the purchase decision of a consumer is affected by others, you need to have a persona created around those ‘others’ as well.
Buyer Personas help you in understanding direct and authentic content right from the consumers’ point of view and then align your marketing efforts accordingly to ensure success.
The fact of the matter is that it’s impossible to know the traits of all your customers, however, Buyer Personas can be treated as a sample to assume the behavior of a set of consumers together.
2. Why are Buyer Personas Important?
As mentioned earlier, they provide you with actionable insights that can be of huge help when devising specific marketing strategies.
It can help you in altering your content so that it fits exactly into the consumer need gap.
Buyer Personas help you to understand consumer pain points.
Let me get a little deeper here to make you understand this statement.
It’s important to note, that consumers are growing wary of advertising campaigns or marketing efforts in general.
So unless and until you prove to your customers that you understand their pain, they wouldn’t care about your product.
You might be wondering at this point, that my market research can also help me with this content, then why a Buyer Persona?
Now let me explain why
For example, you can know if your customers are pet lovers, their favorite pet, etc from market research.
But more specific insights into their journey can only be provided through a Buyer Persona.
Also, Buyer Personas are evolving in nature.
You cannot create one in the start and expect to use it all throughout, that’s not the way it works.
You need to alter it, you need to work around the changes that have taken place in your product as well as your consumers’ life.
3. How are Buyer Personas used?
At the most basic level, Buyer Personas allow you to create content and marketing messages that are specifically designed for your target audience.
But if you need to understand this in-depth, Buyer Personas can be used in the following ways-
a. Product Development
Buyer Personas can help you in building product road-maps.
Because they will give you insights on what needs to be prioritized, concerning changes required to ensure the best product.
b. Effective Strategies
If your marketing strategy is broad in nature, it may not cater or connect to your consumers directly.
But Buyer Personas can help you understand consumer point of view from real-life scenarios, for example, what problem they faced while shopping for a product in your category.
So you understand the problem at hand, in a much better way to devise effective strategies.
c. Improves your sales pitch
They say sales is one of the toughest jobs to crack.
But Buyer Personas can make the process easier because they help you understand problems that the consumers are already facing.
Now imagine you utilizing this same content to talk to your customer.
The impression is bound to be a positive one.
4. How do you create Buyer Personas?
You can create your Buyer Persona using the following steps:
1. Audience Research
Here are some practical sources through which you can collect the required information
Contact database- Understand how consumers react to your content, uncover trends about their reaction to certain trends
Feedback forms- Every business website must have a contact us page or just something that helps you get additional information from consumers
Interaction with customers- Your sales team or customer service team is interacting with customers on a day to day basis, get some quality feedback from them
Focus Groups- Focus groups are a great way to not only know about your consumers but also know more about how they react in a group setting
2. Empathize with your customer pain points
This might be the toughest step in creating your Buyer Persona.
Why you ask, because the information in this section is hidden.
Consumers may not readily put their problems out there, so for you to get that content, you need to dig deeper.
Today, thankfully we have a medium like Twitter, where consumers can connect with your brand directly.
Lots of learning can be derived from there.
3. Identify the end goal of your customers
What is it that they plan on achieving through the consumption of your product.
So if you know their pain points, this is more like the opposite of that.
What is the solution that they are aiming for by using your product, is what you need to include in this section.
Now there can always be a situation that the content you gather here, may not be specific to your brand.
So do you need to include it, yes you do?
Because it will still give you an insight into your consumer needs nonetheless.
4. Understand the role of your brand in their lives
This is the most crucial section of building your Buyer Persona.
It takes into account everything, right from understanding what your consumers are currently using and what they can use in the future
For example, if your product is a toothpaste, you need to consider the following things
- What brand are they currently using?
- What are the reasons behind that usage?
- Why are they not buying your brand?
- What is that one unique thing your brand has, that can make them switch?
And others
5. Create your Buyer Personas
Now that you have all the information required, from the points above
You can get your pen and paper and start noting down the content easily.
What you will get at the end of it is the perfect Buyer Persona
For your ease, find below a template that can be easily altered for your brand
Buyer Persona Template
