How to Create an Effective Buyer Persona

A buyer persona is a fictional character created to represent a potential customer. A persona is created by businesses to gain a deeper understanding of the needs and wants of their customers, in order to create a more personalised and engaging experience for them.

Why is it Important for Businesses to Create Buyer Personas?

The purpose of creating a buyer persona is to help guide the marketing strategy and content development. Buyer personas enable businesses to identify their customers’ needs and wants, which in turn, helps them to create tailored content that resonates with their target audience.

The buyer persona can also help your business identify the best marketing channels and improve customer satisfaction and retention.

By Kylo 

Building a Demographic-Based Buyer Persona 

There are many ways to develop buyer personas, one of which includes developing a persona based on demographics. This method is often used to create a marketing strategy that is tailored to targeted demographics. 

Demographic-based personas play a crucial role in marketing, as they assist in determining which type of content marketing will be most effective for your target audience.

This method of persona building is especially useful for businesses, as it allows you to segment your market in order to accurately determine what types of messages you should be sending out, who you should be targeting, and what marketing channels will be most effective for reaching your target audience.

The first step in creating a demographic-based buyer persona is to conduct research into your target market. There are many ways to collate data regarding your target market. This includes surveys, interviews with customers, along with data analysis to determine their interests, needs and motivations. 

When creating a buyer persona based on demographics, it’s important to include the following components: 

1. Persona’s age
2. Persona’s gender
3. Persona’s location
4. Language/s the persona speaks
5. Persona’s highest level of education
6. Persona’s occupation
7. Industry the persona works in
8. Persona’s average income
9. What means of communication does the persona typically use?
10. Persona’s interests

Once you have answered these questions, you can then create an avatar by combining this information into one fictional character with a story that reflects their behaviours. The more detail included in these personas, the better they will serve as guides for your marketing efforts.

By Anna Dziubinska

Goals and Needs 

The goal of a buyer persona is to provide an accurate and detailed description of the person who will be using the product or service. Your business should focus on the needs of this persona when designing your content and marketing strategy. Buyer personas can be used to answer questions such as: 

What are their needs? Think about how your product or service can benefit your target customer, and what type of messaging will be applicable to reach your target audience.

What are their goals? Gain an understanding of the goals and interests of your persona. This will allow you to produce content that resonates with them, enabling you to develop meaningful relationships which help improve customer retention. 

Who do they trust? In addition to doing a thorough analysis of the type of content generated by competitors, ensure that you also gain a grasp of the type of companies that your target audience interacts with. This will enable you to develop a powerful marketing strategy that engages your target audience and builds loyalty.

What type of content do they consume? You must identify which type of content your persona already engages with when you are building a buyer persona. From this, you can build your marketing strategy with content that is relevant to your target audience, so they will not only engage with it but potentially share it with their network, allowing you to reach larger audiences.

By Kaleidico

Challenges and Solutions

One of the common challenges when building buyer personas is that they’re often based on assumptions from marketers. These assumptions may be wrong, which can lead to ineffective marketing campaigns that waste time and money.

The solution to this problem is to get feedback from current customers about their needs and wants, which can be conducted through surveys and interviews. For example, you can interview current customers about how they would describe themselves and what they are looking for in a company, product or service.

By Patrick Perkins

Where to Find?

Before you build your buyer persona, it’s important that you conduct thorough research into your target market, so that your persona is as accurate as possible.

One effective place to start your research is by evaluating your competitors, as well as companies in the same industry to gain a sense of their customer demographics and behaviours.

To build an accurate buyer persona, you can evaluate your existing customer base and build a persona that’s based on shared demographics, interests and needs. You can also entice your existing customers to share information through incentives, such as referrals and discounts.

By Lukas Blazek

HubSpot Persona

Having become a HubSpot partner earlier this year, we’ve been further enhancing our processes of effective buyer persona creation using the HubSpot platform. If you’re looking to learn more about creating buyer personas, check out the ‘Make My Persona Tool’ on HubSpot.

You’ll learn about all the appropriate steps in order to create an effective buyer persona.

You’ll also be able to build the characteristics of your persona, choosing from various attributes that are suitable for your target audience.

Example of a Buyer Persona created for FIS Solutions

Here at Yay!Starter, we have over five years of experience researching and creating effective buyer personas for clients. 

For our client FIS Solutions, a FinTech company that provides loan management software to lenders and loan providers, we began our buyer persona creation process by researching B2B user groups within companies. This included payday loans and auto loans and focused on roles such as CFO (Chief Financial Officer) and Project Manager.

The next stage of the persona creation process involved creating persona demographics. This identified the background of the personas, such as their age, location and occupation. Once this was completed, we then pinpointed the interests, goals and needs of the persona, in order to determine the best method to target them.

We developed several personas for various senior roles within a company that was applicable to FIS. Using this data, we were able to direct our marketing efforts so that we could generate quality leads, as well as save time and resources for our client.

Do you need help with creating buyer personas for your business? Feel free to get in touch with the team at Yay!Starter who’ll help you get started with your buyer persona journey.