How To Create A Buyer Persona: 5 Key Strategies

!! Congratulations!! Today you will learn how to create a buyer persona, that is, the profile of your ideal client. If you are a faithful reader of the blog, you will know that we mention this term many times.

Defining a buyer persona only makes marketing strategies more objective and the life of your business lengthens.

So get comfortable and know everything you need to know about a buyer persona and why defining it only brings benefits to your brand.

Table of Contents

What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is a fictitious representation of your ideal buyer. It can also be defined as a character created through personality characteristics, needs, emotions and rituals.

This character has the characteristics of your ideal client: their purchasing power, profession, tastes, hobbies and other characteristics of a person that lead them to buy from your business.

The behavior of a user is key to begin to determine a buyer person. But it is also important to determine what prompts you to take these attitudes.

Marketing departments usually create these profiles, have them written down on paper and even put names to them, in order to redirect advertising and sales efforts towards people with these characteristics.

1. Will the buyer persona be the same as the target persona?

A fundamental mistake that some brands have made that do not have digital marketing advice is to confuse these two concepts.

To confuse and limit your brand is to condemn it to failure.

When we talk about the target person we refer to all demographic data such as: Age, profession, gender, education, religion, economic status among others. It is believed that this is enough to start promoting and revolving content around a product or service.

While segmentation is important, reducing your product or service to a market devoid of emotions, brand rituals, and personality traits is reducing your success.

The buyer persona starts from a need and how this need can be satisfied.

Imagine that at Globally Info we only dedicate ourselves to creating reach and visibility for 3-year-old professional users residing in the world. It would be a mistake since it is very possible that professionals and loyal visitors require to reach and have visibility on the internet. This is the need.

How to create a proposal that satisfies you? This is where your internet strategies should start.

Importance of creating buyer personas

Surely after reading how to create a buyer persona this importance will be clear. At the moment we mention some compelling reasons that indicate the importance of creating these profiles:

You adapt a communicational tone: If you know the needs of your ideal client, you know how to refer to him. So you can become aware of what is similar to make insight into your needs. When you talk about you to you, the client knows what you are referring to and it is as if he had waited to read these proposals all his life.
By knowing your needs and how you search for them, you are ready to employ effective branding strategies.
You improve the shopping experience. When you determine the processes that the user goes through on your website, you improve the formula attract> convert> retain.
You prioritize communication channels. When you determine the communication channel with the most influence through which your buyer persona arrives. This way you determine which strategies to implement before others.
You improve the branding strategy: You begin to consider the idea of choosing brand emotions, creating rituals in relation to your product, creating a personality among others.

How to create a buyer persona: 5 key strategies

Since you understand the whole concept of what a buyer persona is, with which it is often confused, and why it is of great relevance to use these profiles, it is time to learn how to create it.

1. Collect all the information you consider necessary

Socio-demographic data is important when starting to create profiles of a buyer persona. The difference is that in the buyer person they are just one more element to determine and not the central point.

In the article on marketing positions for a company, we mentioned that the community manager should take the role of spy. The same is true when you have to collect information from your ideal customer.

For this reason, we mention more data where you have to set your goals:

Sociodemographic data: Age, gender, location, education, professionalism, social status, monthly income.
Current Status: Is that user Single? Married? Newly separated? Although it seems part of the sociodemographic data, the current status also determines the level of relevance of the user.
Internal motivations: What makes you wake up each day? What are your goals?
Challenges to which he is presented: Have you read his complaints? What challenges does it present day by day? One place where you can find this is on their social media.
Emotions and behaviors: How does it respond to a certain interaction with your product or service? A suggestion of this information is if you leave comments on your website, which articles you spend more time on, among others.

2. Start a good research

In many cases, the representatives of a brand have no idea where to start creating a buyer persona, or where to start their research. In this section we will mention two scenarios:

When you still don’t have clients

It may seem even more difficult for you to start executing strategies if you don’t have clients. The beginnings are tough and require patience and perseverance. If you have already evaluated a niche and starting from logic you have a notion of what your ideal client would be like, start by doing the following:

Carry out a market study

To learn how to create a buyer persona you must first investigate what you are up against:

What buyer personas does your competition has.
How these have arrived at these pages.
How they respond to the content of the competition.
What strategies should you use to differentiate yourself?
Where to begin.

A market study allows you to broaden your perspective and also know what you are up against.

Take the first step of interviewing potential clients

If you have created an investigation of your buyer persona and have studied the market, you must have an idea of where they are. Take the initiative to offer your potential buyer persona an interview. You can, for example, get in touch with one of these members through LinkedIn.

How to get this user to be really interested in being part of your interview?

Offer a reward: It can be a discount on a purchase, a sample, a post blogging strategy, visibility of the interview on social networks.
Make it clear that the data is not for a sale: Make it clear to this potential customer that the questions answered are not specifically to win a sale, but to strengthen aspects of the brand that are not yet entirely clear.

Through the digital channels you like to consume

If you have done the exhaustive research that we have described throughout the article, you will also know how he likes to consume content.

Do you like video marketing? The multimedia content? The reading? What is the social network where you spend the most time?

Focus on creating content for your ideal client in these formats and measure the results.

When you already have clients

If you have a portfolio of clients, it will be a little easier to inquire directly about their needs. To do this, we suggest you do the following:

Conduct customer surveys

Collect all the necessary information that generates doubts and carry out a survey. Through multiple selections or yes and you will not be able to get an answer to your questions. Don’t just focus on customers who are satisfied with your product or service.

Where a company has the most opportunity to grow is in its adversities. Also, ask your less satisfied customers to participate in these surveys.

You can also use forms or web questionnaires. Questionnaires are good when the customer has decided to abandon your service or subscription.

Through the leads

A lead is a potential tool because it is a user who has shown interest in your brand. When a client leaves their contact information, it is time to find out what their interests are and in which buyer persona list this user enters. Woman? Man? Same current state? One goal.

The lists will be a later point that we will touch on in this article, but they help you to have more than one prospect and to develop marketing strategies based on that profile.

Using analytical tools

There are free tools like Google Analytics and paid tools like SEMrush . In some cases, customers may lie about the information collected in the methods that we describe above.

Either out of grief, out of compromise among a myriad of reasons. What if he cannot lie to us is his behavior on the internet. Through analytics, you will be able to identify the behavior of your buyer persona on your website and on your competition’s websites.

With content already published

If you have implemented an inbound marketing or content strategy, it is time to evaluate. What is the content that your audience liked the most? Where have they spent the most time? What was the theme?

This helps you considerably to create new buyer persona profiles, and also to consider meeting their needs.

In addition to this, you can start developing a “keyword research” or a search for keywords similar to those that are most visited and measure the results.

With the interaction in your social networks

If you already have a presence in social networks, it is much easier to evaluate the profile of the people who interact with your brand.

In addition to this, which publications are most comfortable with, which stories have had a greater reach, and so on.

You can also use all the strategies already mentioned in the stories:

Surveys
Interviews
Questionnaires

A potential social network to start determining buyer personas is Facebook. It has a modality called Facebook Insight that allows you to evaluate in-depth the interaction of your brand with users.

Instagram for its part is also a potential social network to evaluate these interactions. The statistics section allows you to collect sociodemographic data on users. But also observe which of your publications has had the most interaction.

What is relevant in social networks is to be able to have a community manager who does the exhaustive work that this represents. Since in the analysis is the success.

3. Outline and group the needs of each person

If you have understood what a buyer persona is, you will also understand that we are not only talking about a single profile. You may be describing the 23-year-old Psychologist who wants to start her own website or the 30-year-old lawyer who has a website but needs to boost her sales.

We are talking about different profiles with the same need, for this reason creating lists allows you to adapt marketing strategies to each buyer person.

4. Be empathetic to your client’s needs

This is a fundamental step when it comes to learning how to create a buyer persona. If you don’t develop empathy, you will hardly be able to connect with your ideal client. In addition to this, you must never forget to humanize your brand. In a world so demanding of emotions and values, you cannot ignore this.

How do you promote empathy for the needs of your buyer persona?

Understanding their emotions and giving them a solution to it.
Describing and conceptualizing these needs through a one-to-one conversation.
Creating rituals that make your consumer’s life much happier. For example, freelancers at Starbucks love to start reading their work emails inside this establishment in the morning hours.

5. Develop specialized marketing strategies for each buyer persona

If you have followed the strategies step by step to learn how to create a buyer persona, all you have to do is get down to work with each profile.

When you decide to have more than one ideal client profile or buyer persona, you extend the life of your business and do not limit it to only one target.

A target is an inanimate user, without emotions or aspirations, who only need a specific product or service. Basing your brand on a target will make it die before it is born.

It is necessary not to forget that the user is still a human and in need of human solutions.

Final recommendations to learn how to create a buyer personas

Your buyer persona is constantly changing: So to determine more quickly, focus not on the behaviors that you perform, but the why of them. Behavior is the first indicator, but knowing what motivates you to these behaviors is much more robust.
Don’t be obsessed with collecting too much information, to begin with: Adapt your strategies to the information you have obtained, when launching your brand much more information will be manifested.
Be realistic and functional: The important thing is to find adaptability to the product or service. So it is important to segment but not too much, evaluate the probabilities of use in various sectors.
Be attentive to the details: Have your critical eye as activated as possible, in this way you will know how to detect any information that may be relevant to create a new buyer persona.