What is a Buyer Persona and how do you create one for your brand?

The marketing world is so huge that it’s actually more like a universe. There are all types of brands looking to offer products and services and ways to satisfy the many needs of people. For that matter, we can also find different people we can reach; from a single mother who works as a magazine editor to a 14 year old who likes to read comics and play video games to a 35 year old man who likes to watch the catwalks. The question is, how do I know who I’m speaking to? That’s easy, you can do so by creating a Buyer Persona.

Searching for your main character – What is a Buyer Persona?

You must be wondering what a Buyer Persona is. In short, it’s the people that fit into your story, and to be more succinct, it’s a fictional profile of a person that represents everything you can get to know about our potential audience. You can then approach them through personalised digital marketing strategies.

The best Buyer Persona should cover the main characteristics of the client that we want to reach. You can do this based on data like information on followers on social media, marketing studies, audience segmentation studies, doing polls and analysing competitors’ audiences amongst other techniques.

This profile can be as expansive as we want it to be, using information that we’ve gathered and using our imaginations (like giving your persona a face or even a name). Create fictional identities, but also respect the data gathered during your research.

We can (and should) create all the profiles we need to reach our goals, since clearly one persona cannot represent every possible client’s lifestyle, interests, hobbies, habits and needs. It’s impossible to cover all the client characteristics just with one persona.

Each client is someone and carrying out this activity will allow us to see them as a fully-fleshed out person with needs and worries. The secret weapon here is to not focus on our market relevance or in aggrandising the reasons why we’re better than others, but rather to demonstrate that we have solutions that are useful in the client’s life. We’re not the main character, they are.

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe… what characteristics make an ideal client?

Although we probably have general information about our target audience, the relevance of creating Buyer Persona profiles lies in getting to know and conceptualising specific individuals, with specific needs. This is to help us create a more personalised and assertive communication.

To create a Buyer Persona, we need to know their needs, challenges, what social media they use and, most importantly, what we can offer to help them.

To answer all those previous questions, each ideal client profile needs to be defined with at least the following information:

• Demographics: where do they live, what they’re called, how old they are and what country they’re in.
• Personal information: who they live with, if they have family, marital status, and any perceived income.
• Professional life: what do they work as, what do they specialise in, do they work for a company or are they self-employed, how broad is there work experience.
• Daily routine: what do they normally do in their day-to-day, what places do they often go to and what type of decisions do they have to make.
• Goals and aspirations: this goes from personal goals (making a family, travel, buying a house or a car), to professional goals (their dream job, if they want a promotion or to be their own boss).
• Hobbies and interests: what activities they do and what ones do they like the most, what is it good for, what do they dedicate their free time to, what are their interests.
• Shopping habits: do they shop online, or do they prefer doing it in person, what type of products do they get, how often do they shop, what are their favourite brands.

The deeper we go, the more answers we’ll find to create our buyer persona. It’s up to you how specific you want each persona to be, but you have to consider that with more data, the easier it is to create communication channels. At the end of the day, the best conversations we have are with the people that know us best.

In order to complete this activity, you can use templates to organise information and make it easier to visualise the information relevant to your goals.

Does it actually work? Why should you create a Buyer Persona?

Completing these profiles allows us to achieve different goals easily. For example, once we know who our possible clients are, we can outline the theme, tone and language that will be most effective. Let’s go back to the first example: we won’t talk to a single mother who’s a magazine editor in the same way we would to a teenager or a man that loves fashion – each sector needs to be communicated with differently.

With the help of this tool, we can define our Customer Journey within our inbound marketing content strategy. This way, we can see how the client interacts with the company, how they feel about the interaction and how to improve it, from when they discover the product to buying it.

Creating Buyer Persona profiles is not a one-time process, as with everything, you need to experiment through trial and error. Moreover, you have to consider society and its trends change so often that we need to revise client characteristics from time to time and making sure they’re in line with our goals. If not, you can make the necessary changes.

And they did NOT live happily ever after: creating a customer persona helps, but it’s not a miracle worker.

Creating different customer persona profiles will help us get closer to our target audience, where we can find out what is the best way to talk to them and if the product will be useful in their life. However, there isn’t just one secret formula for success.

After doing a lot of research, maybe the buyer persona doesn’t fit at all with the audience that is actually interested in the product, or that the communication channel used isn’t as successful as thought.

Research is always our best ally, no doubt about it, but it’s not a guarantee to success. The market is constantly changing and something you think is great may not be received in the same way or it may work today and not tomorrow.

So, creating a Buyer Persona won’t guarantee you a “Happy forever after” ending, but it will help you get on the right path… at least until you have to look for new main characters again and history repeats itself.