Developing a Buyer Persona

And why it’s important to your marketing strategy…

Before you can map out your funnel, build your audiences, or write your ad copy, the very first thing you need to do is develop your buyer persona.

You may be asking yourself why this is important but trust us when we say that this step is SO important when it comes to understanding your target audience. When you have a detailed buyer persona to reference, you are much better equipped to gain the attention of customers and encourage them to make a purchase. With this tool, you’ll be able to craft campaigns that meet the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of your target audience.

Let’s dive in and learn the basics for developing a top-notch buyer persona!

A buyer persona is essentially a representation of your ideal customer based on research and what you may already know about your customer if you have existing sales. You can have multiple buyer personas to represent different segments of your target audience but refining one main persona for your business is a great place to start!

There are seven areas that you will need to address for your buyer persona.

Demographics
Background
Desire
Problem
Solution
Consequences
Objections

Don’t get overwhelmed - we’ll walk you through the main questions you need to ask yourself in order to develop your buyer persona. But let’s start with the foundation of your buyer persona…research!

Research

One of the most powerful tools for understanding your target audience and crafting your ad campaigns is solid research. This can be collected by looking at who is currently buying your products and comparing it with who you want to be selling to.

Now, If you just started your online business and don’t have enough customer data to create personas, a good place to start is looking at your competitors. Analyze their advertising messaging and observe what platforms they use to connect with potential customers. From this, you can draw conclusions about who your core customers might be.

A few other ways of conducting research include

Sending out small scale surveys to current customers with questions about your products
Look at what other products and services your target market is interested in
Listen to social conversions: utilize software to learn what is trending among your target audience
Use Google Analytics to examine behavior and activity on your site

After you have gathered research and information on your target audience, you have the tools to start developing your buyer persona! By using multiple sources of information, you will be able to more accurately shape your buyer persona and you will be better equipped to build ad campaigns that connect with your desired audience.

Developing Your Buyer Persona

First off, give your persona a name; this will help you connect on a more emotional, human example. Choose a name that encompasses who your persona is and start working on their demographics. Demographics is the statistical information relating to your ideal customer based on gender, age, race, marital status, location, and income. Next, you can jump into their background such as level of education, what their job or career path looks like, and what phase they are in of the family cycle (are they young parents, are they empty nesters, are they single?)

For example, let's take a look at one of the most recognizable brands out there…Nike. When the company launched its Nike Plus loyalty program and app, one of its buyer personas was named ‘The Weekend Runner.’ This persona was described as a woman in her 30s who runs half marathons on the weekends.

You can see how this short and brief description gives life to who Nike’s ideal customer is and the more specific you get, the better you know how to communicate and connect with these customers!

After you set up the ‘bio,’ so to say, the next step is to really analyze the ideal customer’s desires. To do this, ask yourself these three questions…

What do they want?
What are their values?
What are their goals as it relates to your product?

This gives you a comprehensive idea of what motivates your customers and how to get them to make a purchase decision. Unless you can identify what the audience wants, they will never care to pay attention to your brand.

Next, you must identify what external problems your customer is dealing with and what internal frustrations they may have. When you identify your customer's problems and address them in your advertising, they recognize your brand as one that understands them. This opens the door to a powerful way you can connect with customers through advertising. Most marketers fail to connect with the target audience in this way and miss out on the opportunity to build a connection with potential customers. A prime example of this is Apple; they recognized that people felt intimidated by computers so, in response, they created one of the most successful advertising campaigns in history. Marketers pinpointed that customers wanted a simple solution to their internal sense of intimidation. So, Apple sold a solution to that problem and in turn, achieved massive growth and customer loyalty.

The key phrase here is, “they sold a solution to the problem.” The keyword is ‘solution’ so let’s focus on this step in developing your buyer persona.

What kind of solution are you offering to your customers? This is is the core of your advertising campaigns. To define and craft your messaging, ask yourself these two questions.

How can customers use your product to experience the positive change they desire?
Who are your brand’s key competitors and why is your product a better solution?

A quote by Donald Miller is “Never assume people understand how your brands can change their lives…tell them.”

It’s up to you to help your customer see how great their life can look if they buy your product. Additionally, they have to buy into the vision of where your brand is taking them and why your brand, over competitors, can help them achieve their goals.

Once you have a defined solution to your customer’s problems, what kind of consequences are at stake if they don’t buy your product?

Inherently, people are always looking for ways to avoid failure and achieve success. Meaning that they are often willing to purchase a product if it will help them achieve their goals and minimize any negative impacts.

You can address the negative consequences of not buying your product by showing them what kind of benefits your product offers. This will encourage them to take action in order to avoid negative consequences.

The last area to address of your buyer persona is objections. Ask yourself what objections potential customers may have to purchase your product?

Then brainstorm what kind of offers you can use to alleviate their fears of buying your product. Some examples include…

Discounts
Social proof (testimonials, press awards)
Stats
Guarantees

Another powerful tool in advertising is ‘user-generated content’ (UGC) or testimonial-style product reviews. These tools visually show viewers the positive experience other customers have already had with your brand and also help build trust and credibility.

Consumers will still not buy from you unless you remove objections and fears of buying your product. One way you can mitigate risk for first-time customers is by offering a discount, but only as long as it is still profitable. You can also build trust by displaying stats of how many customers you have helped or providing money-back guarantees.

We have seen too many startup companies jump into advertising without first building trust and addressing the objections of their customers. This leads to a loss of time and money, so make sure you thoroughly address this step!

Final Thoughts

We said it at the start, and we’ll say it again! A well-developed buyer persona is SO important!

The buyer persona is the first step in really understanding your audience and it will guide the rest of your marketing strategy. It truly is the foundation to mapping out your funnel strategy, building your audience, writing copy, and creating your ads.

The buyer persona will help you make strategic decisions moving forward. In fact, NetProspex published a case study reporting that its target persona creation efforts led to a doubling of the number of page views per visit, a 900% increase in site visit duration, and a 171% spike in marketing ROI.

This goes to show that putting the effort into developing a data-driven buyer persona can really pay off. Whether it’s gathering market research or existing customer data, you can create a solid framework on which to build the rest of your marketing strategy.