BUYER PERSONA
A buyer persona is a detailed description of someone who represents your target audience. This persona is fictional but based on deep research of your existing or desired audience.A buyer persona is a detailed description of someone who represents your target audience. This persona is fictional but based on deep research of your existing or desired audience.
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a detailed description of someone who represents your target audience. While fictional, this persona is based on deep research of your existing or desired audience and can be used to refine your marketing strategy and product positioning.
A buyer persona is also called a customer persona, audience persona, or marketing persona. Different types of customers buy your products for different reasons, so you might need to create more than one buyer persona.
Why are these tools useful? Well, you can’t get to know every customer or prospect individually. However, you can create customer personas to represent your customer base.
Give each buyer persona a name, demographic details, interests, and behavioral traits. Take time to understand their goals, pain points, and buying patterns. If you want, you can even give them a face using stock photography or illustration.
Why are buyer personas important to your business?
1. Buyer personas help you personalize your marketing.
Personalization is the main reason buyer personas are essential, and it’s only possible when you truly understand your audience. Customers appreciate personalization, as 96% of marketers say it increases the likelihood of buyers becoming repeat customers and 94% say it increases sales.
2. Buyer personas inform product development.
Extensive research into your target customer doesn’t only help your marketing functions — these insights have a place in the research and development phase of your product development process.
Understanding what your ideal customer experiences on a day-to-day basis can inspire innovative improvements to your product.
3. Buyer personas enable the optimization of demand generation, lead generation, and lead nurturing content.
Do you know your buyer persona wants to hear from you? One way to find out is through buyer persona research. Understanding how your ideal customer prefers to receive communication can influence your demand generation strategies.
For example, a preference for SMS communication among your target audience can mean you create SMS lead nurturing campaigns instead of emails. You can even justify website changes based on the data you discover from your research.
4. Buyer personas help you tailor your product's messaging its target audience.
Buyer personas help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) better, making it easier for you to tailor your content, messaging, product development, and services to meet your target audience’s specific needs, behaviors, and concerns.
For example, you may know your target buyers are caregivers, but do you know the type of care they provide most often? What is the typical background of your ideal buyer? To fully understand what makes your best customers tick, developing detailed personas for your business is critical.
Types of Buyer Personas
While developing your personas, you may ask yourself, “What are the different types of buyer personas?” From there, it’d be simple to adjust one for your businessZ
Gen Z
Gen X
Here are some key stats about Gen Z:
- 64% of Gen Z have discovered a product on social media in the past three months.
- Recommendations from influencers have a stronger impact than those from friends and family.
- Gen Z cares, more than any other generation, that brands stake a stance on social issues, especially about racial justice (47%), LGBTQ+ rights (46%), and climate change (41%).
- Gen Z likes to gather information themselves when researching a product or service (64%)
- Gen Z’s favorite form of content is short-form video. (61%)
Here are some key stats about Gen X.
- Gen X prefers discovering new products on social media and surfing the internet.
- Gen X enjoys and engages the most with images/photos/infographics.
- Overall, Gen X prefers to purchase products from online retailers that sell a variety of brands.
- The quality of a product has the highest influence on Gen X’s decision to make a purchase.
- Gen X doesn’t think companies should take a stance on social issues.
Create Your Own Buyer Persona Template
Having a buyer persona template is essential before conducting research. It enables you to organize insights and gather information required to paint a comprehensive picture of your hypothetical customer.
Demographics
Demographics are the characteristics of a specific population. They are often closely related to the individual’s identity and can have a large impact on their experience of the world.
Some examples of demographics are:
- Age
- Sex
- Location
- Family status
- Level of education
Because demographic factors are such an important component of the customers experience, they should definitely be included on the user persona template.
Professional Status
Professional status refers to the occupational or employment status of individuals in the market audience.
These can include:
- Job title
- Industry
- Work arrangement (in office or remote)
- Level of seniority
- Income
Psychographics
Psychographics refer to personality, values, interests, and attitudes of a target audience. It goes beyond demographics to identify the psychological characteristics of individuals that influence their behavior as consumers.
Some examples include:
- Values
- Beliefs
- Political views
- Lifestyles
Purchasing Process
Purchasing process data provides information about how customers make purchases.
This includes:
- Role in the purchase decision-making process
- Potential lifetime cycle (the frequency or use or purchase)
- Barriers in the purchasing process
How to Find Interviewees for Researching Buyer Personas
One of the most critical steps to establishing your buyer persona(s) is finding people to speak with to understand, well, who your buyer persona is.
But how do you find these interviewees? There are a few sources you can tap into.
1. Use your current customers.
Your existing customer base is the perfect place to start your interviews because they’ve already purchased your product and engaged with your company. At least some of them are likely to exemplify your target persona(s).
Don’t just talk to people who love your product and want to spend an hour gushing about you (as good as that feels). Customers who are unhappy with your product will show other patterns that will help you form a solid understanding of your personas.
2. Use your prospects.
You can also interview people who have not purchased your product and know little about your brand. Your prospects and leads are great options because you already have their contact information.
Use the data you do have about them (i.e., anything you’ve collected through lead generation forms or website analytics) to figure out who might fit into your target personas
3. Use your referrals.
You might need to rely on referrals to talk to people who may fit into your target personas, particularly if you’re heading into new markets or don’t have any leads or customers yet.
Use your network (coworkers, existing customers, social media contacts, etc.) to find people you’d like to interview and be introduced to. Getting a large volume of people with this method can be tough, but you’ll likely get some very high-quality interviews out of it.
4. Use third-party networks.
For interviewees completely removed from your company, you can recruit from third-party networks. You’ll have less control over sessions run through UserTesting.com, but it’s a great resource for quick user testing recruiting. Now that you know how to find interviewees, I’ll go over some tips for recruiting them.
