Understanding how to create a buyer persona is crucial for effectively targeting your audience and crafting a successful marketing strategy. By identifying and segmenting your target market, you can tailor your messaging and products to meet the specific needs of your customers.
What is a buyer persona and a negative persona?
A buyer persona or a customer persona is a description of a fictional person who has the characteristics of your target customers.
A negative persona, on the other hand, is a person who your products would simply not be a good fit for; the opposite of a buyer persona.
For example, if you are a piano tutor and you sell beginner courses online, your negative persona would be people who are at an intermediate or advanced level. While they may still be interested in learning the piano, your course would not be a good fit for them.
Understanding both your buyer persona and negative persona is important because it can help you to make well-informed business decisions with a clear picture of your target customers. You’ll be able to develop products that solve actual problems they face.
A negative persona will help you to separate the bad apples from the rest of your segmented target group, and therefore not waste any time or money chasing after them.
This article will go over how to create customer personas. But first, let’s have a look at 5 reasons why they are so important in the first place.
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5 reasons why buyer personas are important
1. You’ll get a better understanding of your target market
The main purpose of creating a buyer persona is to understand your target customers better. You’ll get to know their demographics, interests, spending power, pain points, and so many other details.
Having such useful insights will help you develop products that are more appealing to them, establish the most appropriate marketing channels, and shape your brand’s tone of voice. Without a buyer persona, you’d be forced to make such important decisions based on assumptions.
2. You’ll establish the most suitable marketing channels
A buyer persona will give some direction to your marketing efforts by pinpointing exactly where your target customers are most likely to be found.
For example, if you find that your buyer persona is a middle-aged man who works in HR, you’ll know that such a person is more likely to be found on LinkedIn than on Instagram or even Twitter.
3. You’ll be able to create laser-focused campaigns
When you have a deep understanding of your target consumers, you’ll be able to create marketing campaigns that are specifically tailored for them. You’ll be able to speak in a language that they understand and present your products in a way that resonates with them.
4. You’ll be able to create segmented marketing campaigns
Segmented campaigns target smaller groups of people with similar interests. They often have a much better ROI than broad campaigns since they can be customized as per each segment’s characteristics, which can help increase the conversion rate.
For example, if you sell piano courses for beginners, you can create a campaign targeting parents who would like their kids to learn piano, and a different one targeting adults who already know that they want to learn the piano. The message in each of the campaigns would be completely different.
If you have 10 different personas then you can create 10 segmented campaigns as opposed to a single broad one.
5. You’ll get a better ROI from your marketing efforts
Most digital advertising platforms including Google Ads and Facebook Ads have a wide array of targeting options to help advertisers reach their most ideal customers efficiently. For example, you can target users based on their age, location, gender, interests, and so many other factors.
A buyer persona will help you make the most out of such advanced targeting options and create laser-focused campaigns with a guarantee that will reach their intended audience. The better the targeting on your ads, the better your ROI is going to be since only people who are most likely to convert will be targeted.
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How to create a buyer persona or a target customer persona
Step 1: Research
The goal in this phase is to collect information about your current customers that will later be used to give an identity to your buyer persona.
If your business is yet to launch and you don’t have any customers, you can analyze your closest competitors. Their customers will be a representation of who your customers are going to be. Some great competitor analysis tools include Buzzsumo and Similarweb.
Some information you may want to collect include:
- Age
- Location
- Industry
- spending power
- Interests
- Size of business (for B2B companies)
- Who makes the purchase decision (for B2B companies)
There are many ways to obtain such information. For example, you can get it from your customer database, Google Analytics, or social media analytics. You can also create surveys or do interviews and then offer incentives to get people to participate.
Step 2: Identify their pain points
After concluding the initial research, you’re probably going to end up with lots of raw data about your customers. This next step is to establish what their pain points are.
What exactly are they trying to solve by using your products (or your competitor’s)? What’s preventing them from achieving success in what they’re trying to accomplish?
The best way to obtain this information is by reading customer reviews and comments on social media pages. Any negative comment you come across is a potential pain point.
You can also use a social listening tool such as Hootsuite to monitor mentions of your brand, competitor, or products. That gives you a real-time look into what people are saying.
If you have a customer service team then it would be a good idea to also check in with them since they are the ones who interact directly with customers. Find out what are the most common complaints they get.
Step 3: Identify their goals
While pain points are the challenges that customers face, goals are the things they are trying to achieve. Understanding them will help you design products with a clear image of their end game.
Just like in the previous step, you can find this information through social listening and by having a chat with your customer service team.
In some cases, you’ll find that their goals are not directly tied to the products themselves. They may be more personal or emotional.
Although it may not be possible to create final products that can fulfill them, knowing them can still be the foundation of your marketing campaigns. You’ll be able to shape your tone of voice and create messages which speak to them on a deeper level.
Step 4: Understand how you can help
Once you know your customer’s pain points and goals, it’s now time to start planning how you can help them.
This is the step where you get to establish whether you actually have the capacity to create unique products that have a purpose and can solve real-life problems people are facing.
Ask yourself these key questions:
- How exactly can you help overcome each of the pain points that you’ve noted down? Do you have the time and resources needed to do so?
- How exactly can you help achieve each of the goals? Do you have the time and resources needed to do so?
Be honest with yourself and only give realistic answers based on the situation you’re currently in. If you find that you are unable to create products that can help overcome the consumer’s pain points while achieving their goals, then you’d rather go do something else than waste your time building a business that’s destined to fail.
Step 5: Create the persona
The final step is to organize all the information you’ve collected into separate groups. Each group will represent a persona. You can have as many as 20 different personas.
Organize all the people who have similar pain points and goals into their own group. Give each group a name, a job title, a residential location, and any other distinguishing characteristic. The goal is to make it as close to a real-life person as possible.
For example, if you have a group consisting of male university students who like attending music festivals, working out at the gym, and going for hikes, you could name your group “Active Mike.”
Active Mike’s information could look something like this:
- He is 23 years old
- He is a university student
- He works part-time in a restaurant
- He doesn’t have much money so he lives on a budget
- He likes going for hikes on Sunday afternoons
- He works out at the gym 3 times a week
- He owns a bicycle
- He would like to go on a backpacking trip in Europe after he graduates
Just by the description above, Active Mike sounds like a real person. It would be easier creating products and marketing messages with an image of him in mind, than for just “men” or “university students” in general.
