Before you sell anything, you need to know who you are selling to. Without this information, you are far less likely to convince the buyer to part with their money. Crucially, you’ll get to know them in advance so that you can speak their language and appeal to their interests.
Buyer personas are fictional, hypothetical representations of your typical customers. They are created through detailed market research about your customers’ buying traits. Using a variety of techniques, you create your ‘ideal customer’ so that you know exactly who you are dealing with. This often includes their demographics, motivations, occupation, education, and the challenges and struggles that they face. Essentially, this is a way to target specific areas of your audience and pinpoint exactly what makes them purchase a product or use a service.
To help you with your customer persona, we have provided a persona template that you can use to easily create your own personas.
Buyer personas are vital when initiating any marketing campaign or strategy. By understanding who your target audiences are, you engage with them deeper than surface level. This is crucial in creating a relationship with your target audience and gaining their trust. So, by understanding the pain points of your potential customers, you can create content that addresses these issues. As our buyer persona template will show you, personalised marketing and content is the only way to break through the noise in this digital world. As you would expect, this can have an incredible effect on sales. But it can also filter down to other areas of the business. One excellent example of this is in customer service. By preparing your customer service representatives with a customer persona, they are primed and ready to deliver ideal, bespoke service.
When it comes to creating a buyer persona, there are two main branches, B2C (business to customer) and B2B (business to business). In this article, we will cover both types, as our user persona template is ideal for creating either.
Creating a B2C buyer persona begins with answering the following questions:
By answering these questions and many others contained within our buyer persona template, you form the basis of your target audience. The more rounded and detailed your buyer persona is, the easier it will be to create content relevant to them. For example, if you know your buyer persona is a 16-25-year-old single woman, that is still a very broad scope to work with. However, if you dive deeper, you can create a much more specific persona. For example, a 16-25-year-old woman with a vegan diet and love of yoga.
When it comes to a B2B buyer persona, you will want to ask more tailored and specific questions regarding their line of work, such as:
As well as questions about them as a person, like:
There are, of course, many more questions that you will answer when using our buying persona template. As with the B2C customer persona, the deeper you dive into your target audience, the easier it is to create targeted content.
Answering these varied questions is not the only ingredient to an ideal buyer persona. It is just as important to choose the right people to answer the questions. We always recommend selecting employees across the business to help create your buyer personas. Furthermore, the research you conduct can vary depending on your business, how long you have been running, and what information you hold on your customers. For example, if you already have detailed data on your customer base, it will be far easier to align your buyer persona. By matching your existing data with the answers on the buyer persona template, you can begin to form patterns and are one step closer to a complete buyer persona.
Negative buyer personas are those who you do not want as a customer. Forming negative buyer personas can be just as useful as positive ones. By understanding who you do not wish to target, you can avoid creating content that will attract them to your products. It will also benefit you to compare the negative persona to the positive personas that you have created. In doing so, you can see how they differ and highlight any potential crossovers that may cause you problems down the line. So, for example, if your buying persona is a 16-25-year-old woman with no children, a vegan diet, and a love of yoga, your negative buying persona might be an overweight 65-year-old woman with a love of meat feast pizzas.
Our buyer persona template will allow you to easily create buyer personas bespoke for your business. The more you understand about your target audience, the easier it will be to create content that attracts their attention and leads to more sales for your business.
We always recommend creating multiple buyer personas, both positive and negative to best supplement your upcoming marketing campaigns.
Begin understanding your target audience now by clicking here to download our free, easy to use, buyer persona template.