Buyer personas can be a creative and helpful way of figuring out what your target audience wants and how best to turn them into customers. Creating a buyer persona is much like creating a fictional character, but it’s a fictional character based on your picture of an ideal customer for your business. That’s why it’s important to have a clear buyer persona in your mind so that you know exactly what to look for.
Your buyer persona needs to be grounded in reality, meaning there should be actual customers that fit that description more or less. So how do you create “accurate” buyer personas? Here are a few of our top tips:
#1 – Base Your Persona On Data
One way to ensure you have an accurate, effective buyer persona is to ground that buyer persona in data that you’ve collected. Look at the consumer trends of your target audience. Look at the results of surveys for information like income, age demographics, and more. This way you’re not just throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping that someone finds it relatable. You’re looking at trends that are already relevant to your audience and collecting them into one buyer persona.
#2 – Look At Your Existing Audience
Take a look at your website demographics to see your current audience. Sometimes there’s a discrepancy between the audience you think your product or service will resonate best with and the audience that actually takes to your brand the most. Make sure you’re on the same page with reality on who wants your product. Look at age demographics, trends, and the webpages that they look through the most. This will all help to inform your buyer persona.
#3 – Interview Your Customers
If your customers are willing, interview them about your brand. Ask them what they like and what they don’t like. Consider having a focus group who can provide feedback that will help you to visualize your ideal buyer. After all, you don’t want to shut out your current customers. You want to keep them with you. You may have ideal buyers with you already: the point is to get more of those customers.
#4 – Talk To Your Sales Team
Sometimes customers don’t want to spend their time going through an interview for even their favorite brands. But your sales team will be happy to answer any of your questions. No one knows the trends of your customers better than your sales team. They can help you create your buyer personas by providing the reality about your actual sales numbers and who your product sells to. When you have that information, you can market to that audience and rake in even more sales.
#5 – Create Multiple Buyer Personas
Your brand is likely to appeal to multiple types of buyers, and it might appeal to them for different reasons. If you want to be accurate and comprehensive, create a few different buyer personas. This should still be based on data and feedback from your existing audience and your sales team. You’ll notice a few different types in most cases. Create your buyer personas based on that. It’s best to stick to 3-5 at most, so that you can really hone in on them. This will also help you to segment your customer base and market to different segments in different ways.
#6 – Put Yourself In Their Shoes
A buyer persona is much more than just occupation and income and age demographic. You need to be able to think about their goals, the issues they’re facing, and their typical buyer journey. So take a moment to put yourself in the shoes of your ideal buyer. What would bring them to your brand? What would they be drawn to? What would lead them to make a purchase and what might turn them off?
This sort of empathy will help to fill in the gaps of your buyer persona. You can go into further detail that way, both for creating the persona and creating marketing campaigns to reach out to that buyer persona.
#7 – Include Quotes
Your buyer persona doesn’t have to be completely fictional. In fact, it shouldn’t be. Sprinkle it with real quotes — whether from your market research or from the interviews with your customers, sales teams, or focus groups. These quotes can help you to place yourself in the shoes of the ideal buyer, or they may offer you insights into how to market to them. These quotes will also add more authority to your buyer personas if you need to show them to executives in order to justify a new marketing strategy.
