The power of the buyer persona

Imagine your top customers. What do they have in common? What makes them unique as compared to your other customers?

Now, imagine what your business would be like if you attracted more of those top customers?

By creating a buyer persona (also known as a customer persona, audience persona, or consumer persona) you'll have a face, name, and story to relate to - like "Sam the student". You can use it to target your marketing efforts, improve or create products, improve your website, and so much more. Just think "Would our persona respond positively to this?".

Depending on your business, you may have one or several buyer personas. For example, you own a restaurant. One of your personas may be "Peter the parent" and another would be "Vivian the vegan". There may be some things that overlap between the two (i.e. Vivian is also a parent), but they each have their own motivations, challenges, and objectives.

Creating a buyer persona

1. Download our free buyer persona template to help you capture the following information.

2. Define your ideal customers.

   1. Demographics categorize individuals by characteristics like age, gender identity, education level, and occupation.

   2. Firmographics categorize businesses by elements like industry, employee size, and revenue.

   3. Psychographics are the different values, attitudes, and opinions that unite people.

   4. Behavioral classifies people by common behaviors like technology usage, buying behaviors, interests, and more.

3. Be mindful of our unconscious biases. To help overcome those, look to use gender-neutral names, various images for the headshots, and consider people with visible and invisible disabilities. To learn more, read this article from Bentley University.

4. Conduct research

   1. Interview your employees to see how they describe your persona, what questions they get, etc.

   2. Create a test audience in Facebook to see how many people fit within your persona demographics or behaviors.

   3. Google the defining characteristics to see what's going on in the news that might impact your assumptions.

5. Complete your personas and communicate them to your team. They should keep these personas in mind when making decisions that impact your customers.

These personas are working documents that can change as you learn more about your ideal customer(s).

What to do with your personas

Now, that you have your buyer personas you should start to identify SMART objectives that you want from each persona. For example, you may want to get 30 "Sam the students" to like your Facebook page in the next three months.

Then, start to build out what you'll need to accomplish those objectives.

If you have questions, or need any help with these steps, just let us know.