If you’ve ever done any marketing or business online, you may have heard this term – “Buyer Persona”. What is it and where do you get one?

That’s what this we’re planning to educate you on with this article.

What is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a research-based profile that describes a business’ ideal customer. In addition, it goes into details like what their days are like, what their challenges are, and how they make purchases.

It’s common for businesses to have multiple buyer personas because all businesses have multiple verticals and potential client bases. These individuals all have different criteria and processes for evaluating a product. In such cases, the product becomes important to many different buyers, and the business will need to employ different marketing strategies to reach those customers and meet their needs.

Buyer personas illuminate what customers buy, who they buy it from, and why they make a certain buying decision. They help businesses understand their consumers better so that they can do a better job of acquiring, delighting, and retaining them.

Why Do They Matter?

Buyer personas are helpful tools to help ensure activities involving your customers are well tailored. After all, personalization and customization is expected in today’s marketplace.

Unsurprisingly, this sounds like a no-brainer, but is not implemented as often as you’d expect.

Start noticing how companies present themselves through the way they speak to their customers. You’ll notice that a great number of them are very much company-centric and lead with what they do and who they are. It’s rarely about their customers or customers’ needs. 

This disconnect adds friction to the buying decision.

Trust is essential and plays a big role in how customers choose the products and services they want to buy. The best way to gain their trust? You guessed it. Through empathy and a deeper understanding for their needs and alleviating their concerns.

By using buyer personas, you can switch the conversation from a company-centric perspective to one that’s always centered on the needs of your customers.

How To Get Started?

The process of developing an identifiable buyer persona is fascinating in and of itself. 

In order to craft a persona, you should develop a thorough understanding of your ideal customers, and this exercise alone will help you find things you had not considered before.

Do this as a group assignment with your founders or staff. Define who you think your ideal customers should be individually. Then, you can compare your answers with those of your co-workers, which will help you to verify any inconsistent answers and ideas in your perspectives.

An important benefit of having a buyer persona is that it helps you gain insights into how to better meet customers’ needs. Aligned with this is the understanding from your entire organization that their view of the ideal customers is the same.

Building A Buyer Persona

Personas should combine internal and external customer research. Be sure to include multiple personas because you’ll want to be attracting different types of customers. Working on all of them in one go can be overwhelming, do it at your own pace and start progressively.

Pick one target audience and set of customer behavior traits in mind, then build a persona based on your understanding of who that customer is, and use more research to enhance it. 

A good way to start is to develop some questions that can be asked to other team members during your interviews. We’ve listed a few good areas to check on in this buyer persona template we created.

The persona you build should reflect the customers you attract to your business. The ideal buyer personas are your dream customers and the ones you want to bring more of to your business.

Remember that this is an ever-evolving image of your customer. The buyer personacan change as you gather more information or develop your brand.

Conclusion

Buyer personas are a great way for you to identify who your target audience is and how to reach them. Having it all written down gives you perspective as you can visually see where the gaps are and how you can plan to improve on them. Clarity is the first step to working on a successful business. How are you using your buyer persona to attract and retain your customers?

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