How to Create Buyer Personas for New Business? [Step by Step Guide]

In today’s world, consumers are attracted by marketing strategies customized to their needs and relevant to their personal experiences. Every customer is trying to improve their quality of living uniquely. Thus, companies must understand their target audience to use appropriate strategies to boost their sales.

A Buyer Persona is a research-based fictional representation of your company’s ideal customer or target audience. This can be better understood as the personality profile of your perfect client. You develop this profile using data collected from your existing clientele and making a few educated associations and guesses. Understanding patterns of behaviour and the latest market trends could also help identify the daily challenges experienced by consumers. 

The company’s goal in creating a Buyer Persona is to learn as much as possible about its target audience. When the company can empathize with the customer, it will be able to provide customized service, helpful content and appropriate sales information. This information will also help them devise relevant market strategies that could help their business grow.

It may also be that you need multiple buyer personas for your business. Suppose your product requires the approval of other individuals (for example, a parent) before it reaches the end consumer (a child). In that case, you need to create separate buyer personas for each individual involved in the decision-making process.

This is because a parent would have different criteria for judging the value of your product as compared to a child. Thus, different marketing strategies would need to be devised to meet the requirements of a parent and a child.

Role of Negative Buyer Personas

Apart from creating the regular buyer person, a negative buyer persona is an interesting aspect of the targeting. Some companies create them to get a clearer picture of their target audience by highlighting which customers they do not want to interact with. They outline the kind of target audience which they do not want at all. For example, if the product is completely targeted toward women, then all other genders become the negative buyer persona. This helps companies create messages that are more specific and clear. 

Buyer Persona Statistics

Creating detailed buyer personas requires some initial effort, but the results will make it well worth the effort. Are you still not convinced? Here are some statistics about buyer personas:

• Personas improved the value proposition of 82% of companies.

• Over 71% of companies that increase revenue and lead generation have documented buyer personas.

• It is twice as effective to advertise using behaviorally-targeted ads as to advertise using general ads.

• The usability of a website can be improved anywhere from 2 – 5 times with the use of buyer personas.

Why is it Important to Create a Buyer Persona?

The primary advantage of creating a Buyer Persona is that it helps you understand your consumers and empathize with them. 

The following questions are the best outputs that you can receive by creating a buyer persona: 

1. What kind of content should be created to generate engagement, reach and eventually popularity?
2. What are the challenges and pain points experienced by the consumer?
3. What is the motivation behind a customer making a purchase?

In the information age, providing the right content to the right audience at the right time is crucial. When a company has created a Buyer Persona, they know exactly what kind of content to share and on which platforms they should build their presence.

They will also be better equipped to address the specific needs of their customers and understand what makes them tick.

This knowledge helps your business allocate resources optimally to improve your organization’s productivity at reduced costs. For example, if you are looking to target international clients, then it is unlikely that you will find them through a private profile on Instagram. However, LinkedIn and Twitter or even a cold email can be the best way to increase sales.

A Buyer Persona helps the marketing team create a strategy. Today, everyone uses different social media platforms regularly. Understanding the online behaviours of your Buyer Persona helps marketers create specific content that appeals to their customers’ logical or emotional side. To be as unbiased as possible, it would be best if you did not assume that you know exactly what your customer wants. Instead, you should ask insightful questions about your target audience and how your product can fill specific gaps in their lives. 

Additionally, a Buyer Persona would help various departments gain a shared understanding of their ideal customer. This would allow them to function in sync with each other in the following ways:

1. The Product Development team would benefit from having a Buyer Persona to add appropriate upgrades to their product or remove unnecessary features. They would also be able to understand better what consumers want and fill any market gaps. 
2. The Sales team will be able to build rapport with consumers because they can effectively address critical concerns and challenges experienced by the clients. Empathizing with clients will give them a great experience and make your company look in a favourable light.
3. The Customer Support team would also be able to empathize with consumers who face difficulties and serve them effectively.

How Do You Create a Buyer Persona for New Business?

If you or your business has never created a Buyer Persona, then you should start by creating one or two of them for your business. Here are 4 steps to make sure you have every aspect covered:

Step 1: Research your Buyer Persona

As mentioned before, never assume that you know exactly what your client needs. Conduct thorough research and analyze the data to understand your ideal customer better. Research should incorporate external resources like customers and internal resources like the sales team. 

Your existing client database can be the starting point for your research. It is easy and accessible and can give you a new perspective when diving into its nitty-gritties. Some things that you should pay attention to include: Age, gender, income bracket, family structure and marital status. From a financial perspective, the target group’s spending power and purchasing behaviour are essential aspects you should analyse. After identifying which demographic brackets they fall under, here are a few additional questions you could ask them;

1. What is their occupation, and what work does their role entail?
2. How did they learn about your product or service?
3. Where do they prefer shopping- online or offline?
4. Do offers and discounts influence their purchase decisions?
5. Do you approach someone for product recommendations?
6. Is there any regular activity that is stressful to you?
7. What would you say is the least favourite part of your job?
8. What is your day-to-day routine?

Don’t forget to check out your website/page analytics. If you are trying to create a Buyer Persona, you should pay close attention to the demographics of customers who open your website, which pages they view most often and how long they spend on your website. 

Talking to your clients would provide rich information because these are customers who have already purchased your products and shown some level of trust in your company. You could collect this information via short email surveys or telephonic interviews.

Another rich source of information is talking to employees who interact with customers frequently. Employees like sales representatives and customer support are individuals who have direct contact with customers and have better insight into the problems experienced by them regularly.

The Sales team would be an excellent source to understand which factors and product features motivate customers to make a purchase decision. Additionally, they would be informed about the kind of objections and questions customers have about the product. In contrast, the Customer Support team is an excellent source for learning the experiences that customers have had with your product and what difficulties they are facing. 

Lastly, you can learn from your competition and their success. Go through their websites to see, understand and reflect on their content plan frameworks. Also, keep in mind about the various offers and discounts – type frequency and promotion. You could also interview customers who did not buy your products or may have bought from competitor brands. These customers would have made certain evaluative judgements that could serve as necessary information.

Step 2: Organising and Segmenting the Data

To group your data effectively, you need to identify similarities and patterns of behaviour from the information you have collected. These similarities would serve as guidelines for creating a Buyer Persona for your business. 

Once the data has been organised, you must decide how many Buyer Personas you want to make. You could start by creating one Buyer Persona and then add or change them when you learn more about your potential clients. 

Further, if your company provides various products, you might want to create one Buyer Persona for each industry you cater to. Clients may have different goals and pain points for products and services across industries. In this case, you would have to understand the challenges experienced by the client in each industry to offer relevant and appropriate services. 

Step 3: Create a Story for the Buyer Persona

One of the first things you could start with is giving a name to your Buyer Persona. Some marketers prefer using descriptors like Thrifty Tina or Practical Pallavi that help them better understand the character of their ideal client. 

You must dive deep into your research to give the Buyer Persona a background. It is suggested that you describe the persona’s demographic details, daily life, daily challenges, and purchasing behaviour in as much detail as possible. You could also include some of the buyer’s personal goals to understand their wants better. This would help sales representatives interact with potential clients more effectively in the future. One strategy used by marketers before they upgrade or change any of their products or services is to ask themselves, “What would Practical Pallavi do?”

One technique you could use while creating a Buyer Persona is to write freely —  everything you know about your ideal customer. You could even use a creative story to narrate what kind of life the persona lives. While creating a Buyer Persona, remember that more information makes the buyer look and feel more natural. The more real it is, the more advantages it is for the sales and marketing team to devise strategies to serve clients better. 

Step 4: Identify their Roles, Goals & Challenges

Don’t forget that the primary reason you are creating the Buyer Persona is to understand what the ideal customer wants and what are some difficulties face by them. To do this, you will have to ask, “What role does the Buyer Persona play”. This would provide you with a framework for their strengths and achievements. Understanding the roles of a parent or a teacher would help you develop content specific to those roles.

In addition to their roles, you should try to identify your ideal client’s goals, that is, what they aim to achieve. Subordinate goals identified from your data could be clubbed together to form goal sections. This would help you offer each demographic bracket or Buyer Persona personalised content and adequate service. In contrast, understanding a client’s pain points helps you learn whether your products can solve problems experienced by them. Each challenge is an opportunity for your company to offer solutions. Here are some questions that you should ask yourself;

1. What difficulties are encountered by your client?
2. Is there an obstacle or roadblock that is preventing them from reaching their goal?
3. What worries them?
4. What is one thing about their job that they find difficult?

When defining goals and challenges experienced by the Buyer Persona, try to be as specific as you can. A good understanding of this will help you evaluate whether your product benefits customers or makes their lives easier in any way. This additionally makes customers feel like someone is concerned about them, which helps build a positive long-term relationship. 

Conclusion

A Buyer Persona is an ideal customer motivated to make a purchase decision for the products or services you offer. As a representation of your target audience, the Buyer Persona plays a crucial role in helping businesses understand their customers better in a more holistic way. 

In order to create an accurate Buyer Persona, you must tap into external and internal resources that provide rich information about consumer behaviour patterns. Once relevant data has been collected, it should be organized and segmented. 

While outlining the features of the Buyer Persona, you should try to provide as many details as possible. Identifying goals and challenges experienced by the persona is particularly important to understand what motivates them to make a purchase decision. 

The more accurate the Buyer Persona is, the more teams will be able to empathize with it and strive to create practical and effective solutions for its problems.

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