Buyer Persona: How to Create One in 5 Steps
ANA BÁEZIt is one of the key points in an Inbound Marketing strategy and a great tool to make your advertising investment go further. In this post we tell you everything about how to create a Buyer Persona.
You can invest thousands of dollars in advertising, but if you don't have a solid marketing strategy and a clear idea of who your real customer is, you will surely get little results. Nowadays, it is not enough to have a good product, a great service or a solid business. Nor is it enough to have a vague idea of who our target audience is. Not at all! Today, it is essential to know, outline, understand and get along with our ideal customers: understand what they want, what they do, what they are like, what they identify with and what they want to avoid. All this not only to optimize the quality of our products and services, but to improve the communication of our company and build loyalty among our audience. Therefore, from Teipe Digital we share with you a 5-step guide to create a Buyer Persona that will be very useful for your business.
What is Buyer Persona?
Hubspot, one of the most important Inbound Marketing platforms in the world and Partners of Teipe Digital, defines it as “a semi-fictional representation of your ideal clients”. In other words, they are not real people, but rather a model created from the information that companies have about their real users and their experience with their products and brands.
The data and information you have about your real and potential clients are the key to creating a solid Buyer Persona. Here you must work with objective and subjective data and try to thoroughly understand your client's profile. Their geographic location, their purchasing power, what they do for a living, what their cultural consumption is, what their personal aspirations are, what they do in their free time, who they identify with, who they admire, what their fears are, what they want to avoid with your product or service, etc.
The more you know your Buyer Persona, the better you will be able to predict their reactions and communicate better with them, make them feel understood and convince them that your brand is what they need for their life.
What is the Buyer Persona for?
As we mentioned before, the Buyer Persona will help you create better content for your brand. But it will also help you with the general branding of your business: to build actions, symbols and values that will make your client identify with you.
And although this may seem abstract, remember that brand building and efficient communication actions translate into cost reduction. The more effective your campaigns are, the better you understand your customers and the more people you can retain, the more profitable your business will be.
Guide: Create your Buyer Persona in Five Steps
So… Once we understand what it is and what it is used to define our Buyer Persona, the moment of truth has arrived. Below we share a step-by-step guide that can serve as a guide to create profiles for your business. Remember that these are not static formulas, but rather ideas that you will have to work on for several hours and reformulate over time.
Step 1: Establish your needs
The first step is to define an action plan: what data are we going to look for to create a good Buyer Persona? At this stage, we are going to define which questions and data are relevant to our business and which are not. For example, what do they do in their free time? Do they prefer to buy from their mobile or computer? What are their concerns? What are their goals? While we need to have general data, such as where they live, how old they are, or whether they are mostly men or women, it is also necessary to address personal and psychological issues.
Step 2: Sort customer information
At this point, you can take advantage of all the resources at your disposal. Do you have statistics on your buyers? Can you interview them? What can you say about them? It can also be very useful to work with your business's sales team and ask them what they can say about their experience with customers. They are in constant contact with them, so you will surely be surprised by their answers.
But also, if you are starting from scratch or want to go a little further than your own experience, we suggest you analyze the content and networks of your competitors. There you will be able to compare what they are doing, how they are communicating with their audience, who they are talking to, and see which content and channels work best for them and which ones are best to avoid.
In this exercise you will find opportunities to exploit that your competition is not using or a real source of inspiration to create high quality content. There are no limits! Explore their digital ecosystem; social networks, websites, blogs, Linkedin groups, etc…
Step 3: Answer your questions
Once you have gathered all the information, it is time to profile your Buyer Persona. Although all the data seems relevant, try to organize it by answering the questions you asked yourself in step 1.
Once you have answered all the questions, try to see how your products or services respond to the needs that arise from the questionnaire. Find the opportunities that can lead you to solve their needs and also think about how to overcome resistance.
At this point, it is vital that you know your business's strengths and weaknesses and that you are as honest as possible about them. In this way, the strategies you develop will be more powerful and better respond to the reality of your brand.
Step 4: Delineate your Buyer Persona
Now, let's get to work! Grab a pen and paper and start outlining your ideal client in as much detail as possible, using a clear and practical format that's understandable to your entire team.
Give him a name and surname, a face, a body. Write as if he were a character in a novel, what he does, what his story is, what he hopes for in the future, what he fears, what he wishes for, and what his daily life is like.
Step 5: Share and keep improving
Once you've finalized your Buyer Persona(s), share it with the rest of your company. You'll find that it will be very helpful for all sectors beyond marketing to better understand what the customer's needs are and how to address them.
Of course, always keep in mind that the Buyer Persona is not something definitive, but rather, like humans and social situations, it is constantly changing. Therefore, we suggest that you be open to listening to suggestions, criticisms and new ideas. You can schedule meetings periodically to see how the different Buyer Personas you have outlined are changing and define new strategies to communicate with them.
How many Buyer Personas should you create for your strategy?
An excellent question, but one that is difficult to answer! It will depend a lot on your business model and the variety of your products or services.
You have to find the right number so that the number of Buyer Personas is not limiting or that you have to create for the sake of creating. It is good to think about the different product lines that your company has and define from there which profile goes for each product.
Have you already created your Buyer Persona? Have you tried to do so but still have doubts? At Teipe Digital, our team of Inbound Marketing experts will help you create a complete and effective strategy that will help you obtain the best results.
