Today’s post is all about the concept of a buyer persona
In plain terms, a buyer persona is also known as a customer profile.
No matter what you call it, it’s a tool used to narrow down who your target audience is—and who you should focus your marketing efforts on.
Ready to dive into buyer personas? Then let’s get started!
From target audience to buyer persona – but why?
Every business has its own target audiences that it wants to reach and persuade—through various marketing strategies—that their product or service is worth the investment.
Reaching your audience precisely and driving conversions can be a challenge for several reasons:
- Depending on the product, the target group can vary widely in terms of traits and age groups.
- The target audience can be difficult to define, as it often shifts with market trends, new technologies, and new products.
The purpose of a buyer persona is to narrow down a broad audience into a single, representative person, to better focus and personalize marketing.
If the audience is quite broad, it may be useful to work with more than one buyer persona at a time.
How do you narrow down a target group into a buyer persona?
It may seem overwhelming to reduce a large group of people into a single persona.
Still, doing so helps ensure that your marketing efforts are as relevant and cost-effective as possible.
To create a buyer persona, you need data about your target audience.
That data can come from many sources, such as Google Analytics, Meta’s built-in tools, keyword research platforms like Morningscore and Semrush, and more.
Relevant data for designing a buyer persona could include:
- Demographic information (age, gender, education level, geographic location)
- Which platforms the audience uses
- What search terms they use to learn about their challenges
- What they say in reviews of your product or brand
If you need more concrete insights, surveys and interviews can also be useful tools.
This data can then be used to create your buyer persona.
With broad audiences, multiple personas can be developed as needed—but the key is to identify the most common traits from the data and build one or more customer profiles from that.
For example, if your audience spans a wide age range, you can choose the most common age groups and build a persona for each.
The same goes for interests, personality traits, locations, and so on.
With customer profiles, your business can better pinpoint the type of customer it’s targeting, the expected customer journey, and how that type of customer is influenced along the way.
What does a buyer persona look like?
Ideally, your buyer persona should become a fully fleshed-out individual with as many specific details as possible.
This makes it easier to remember during marketing planning and essentially serves as a guideline for your strategy.
Characteristics to consider when designing a persona include:
- Name (a name makes it easier to refer to and remember)
- Demographics (age, gender, marital status, education, location, etc.)
- What the person is looking for (what aspects of your brand are they attracted to?)
- Which platforms they use (social media like Facebook and Instagram, or do they find you through ads elsewhere?)
Naturally, the more information you gather for your buyer persona, the better and more targeted your marketing can be.
Important: buyer personas are not static
Just like target audiences, buyer personas change over time and should never be seen as fixed or unchangeable.
They will evolve with the market, with new brands, new trends, and shifting consumer needs.
There is no permanent formula—so your strategies should always be ready to adjust according to the most relevant market trends to ensure your marketing stays effective and relevant.
The benefit of using buyer personas
You might wonder, what’s the real benefit of investing time and energy into creating a buyer persona for your brand?
Simply put, it allows for more personal and relatable marketing—reaching your audience where they actually are.
In other words, it’s a type of marketing that hits the right people, at the right time, in their customer journey.
Ultimately, this leads to a greater chance of conversions, increased website traffic, newsletter sign-ups, or whatever the goal of your campaign may be.
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