Creating an Effective Buyer Persona

We’ve already talked about what a buyer persona is in a previous blog post. Now it’s time to make one, which can seem like an intimidating process. Don’t worry, we’ll break down every step so it’s easy to follow and you’ll be creating an effective buyer persona before you know it.

Are you ready?

What is a Buyer Persona?

In case you didn’t read our other blog post, a buyer persona is a made-up person that represents your ideal customer. You use different types of information to create this persona.

Creating a buyer persona takes a lot of time and effort, that’s why we’ve broken down the process into four steps. This way you can focus on each step instead of the whole idea.

1. Research

This step is going to take the most time and effort. This is because creating an effective buyer persona is all about collecting data. You can collect data from a variety of places. We went over this a little bit in our buyer persona post but we’re going to go over it again.

You can get information for your buyer persona from social media, previous interactions with customers, analytics, and even from customers themselves. There will also be a little bit of guesswork as well because there’s no way to know everything.

Information You’ll Need:

• Their age
• Their gender
• Their family size (if they have a family)
• Their relationship status
• Type of job they have
• Where they live
• Their income

• Their education level
• Their favorite social media platform
• How do they communicate?
• Their hobbies
• Their search engine habits
• Their fashion style

• What is their favorite product?
• Why do they buy from you?
• What problems are you solving?
• How did they find you?
• Are they the one buying from you?
• What is their budget?

How to Get This Information

There are plenty of easy and unintrusive ways to get this sort of information.

Talk to Employees Who Deal with Customers

This only works if you have a large enough business to have people dedicated to customer service. If you do have this department, talk to people within customer service. They’ll be full of information.

They can tell you common pain points that customers face, how they communicate, and the type of person they run into the most.

If it’s just you who interacts with customers, take notes of what you run into on a daily basis.

Surveys

Get the information directly from the source. If you’ve already built up a customer base, send out an email with a survey inside it.

Offer a special promo code for completing the survey that way people actually take it.

Interviews

Similar to surveys, you can interview some current customers. You can ask if anyone is interested in being interviewed.

Just like with the surveys, you’ll need to make it worth it to your customers. Because an interview will be more effort, offering a free product would be better than a promo code.

When you’re asking about interviews, make sure you let people know this isn’t a sales call, that it’s purely about collecting information.

Make sure you take plenty of time to create the questions you’ll ask the interviewees. You don’t want to put in all that effort to not get the right information.

You could even try interviewing people who don’t buy your products to see what you are doing wrong or if you can change anything. This could also help create a negative buyer persona. (See our other blog post for info on that!)

Social Media

Look at your social media pages and see who’s following you. You’ll be able to get ages, gender, favorite social media platform, location, and other personal details.

Guesswork

Some information you won’t be able to find, no matter how hard you look. This is when you use intuition and try to fill in as many blanks as possible. This could mean creating a random age for your persona or you decide what they’re looking for in your products.

2. Find Patterns and Sort Info

Okay, so you’ve gathered all the information you could, now what? It’s time to sort it all out into the sections discussed above.

This will not only help you feel organized and be able to take things in bits and pieces, but it can also help decide whether or not you need more than one persona.

You can choose to sort it by questions they answer, whether it’s personal or professional info, or any other way you find that makes it easy for you to stay organized.

3. Create a Persona Profile

When you actually start to create your buyer persona you can’t just list out the information. The point of the buyer persona is to make a real person. If you just list all the data out, that’s all it will be, a list of data.

What you should do is use all this information to build your persona like a character in a story.

Buyer Persona Examples

Here are some examples of what a buyer persona can look like.

Environmental Emily

Environmental Emily is a single woman in her 20s and cares a lot about the environment. She lives in the city with her friends because she can walk to most places. Her favorite social media platforms are Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram.

She wants to buy from brands that she trusts, even if their products are a little pricier than the average store. She spends a lot of time researching stores before making a purchase, especially through social media because she feels social media is more truthful.

Emily gravitates towards tighter-fitting clothes in bright colors. She likes having designs on them, but not too bold of a design. She tends to shop at second-hand stores, so you have to grab her attention and convince her to buy something new. Use ads and influencers to capture her attention.

If you can make it past all of Emily’s tests, you’ll have a loyal customer who will gush about your business to her friends and family.

Gamer Greg

Greg is a man in his 30s and loves both video and tabletop games. He doesn’t really care about fashion and would rather spend money on gaming. He’s in a relationship and lives in the city, close to his friends. His friends and family are important to him and he loves to show them that through gifts.

He uses Facebook for a variety of gaming groups and to get the latest gaming news, he also likes to scroll through Twitter when he’s bored. He does like to window shop for cool graphic t-shirts and posters, so visual ads work well on him. Even though he loves to give gifts, he has a hard time figuring out what would be the perfect gift and loves to read recommendations.

He hates talking on the phone and if a store doesn’t offer a chat or email option, he’ll leave right away.

Bargain Hunter Betty

Betty is a teenage girl that loves to express herself through her clothes, it’s too bad that she doesn’t have a lot of money to do it. She either doesn’t work or works only a few hours a week due to school and after-school activities. This means she’s always looking for a great deal.

She constantly scrolls through Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok. While she does window shop, it’s more likely she’ll see your ads than seek you out. Grab her attention with deals or free shipping. Remember, she’s on a budget, so every dollar counts.

When she does buy clothes, she likes to wear a size bigger than she needs because it’ll last longer that way. She doesn’t have any set style, she knows she likes something when she sees it, which makes her a fickle customer. She does tend to follow the latest trends and likes to mimic her favorite influencers.

She wants an easy and free return policy because she doesn’t have time to chase down a business. If a business offers her consistent discounts, she’s more likely to be a loyal customer.

4. Share Your Persona Information

If your business is big enough to have multiple departments, make sure to share your completed persona information with customer service, sales, and marketing. Not only will it help them, but everyone will be on the same page which means a better experience for your customer.

You’ve Created a Buyer Persona!

It’s done! You’ve created one or more buyer persona(s)! It was a lot of hard work but it will pay off in the end as you tailor your business to your customers’ needs. You’ll retain your current customers, gain new ones more easily, and find your business running smoother than ever!

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