How to Create a Buyer Persona: Practical Examples & Proven Techniques

Building a persona requires much more effort than downloading a persona template online, calling an hour-long meeting, jotting down some ideas on a whiteboard, giving your target customer a name, and then designing a PowerPoint slide.

It shouldn’t be treated as “a task” on a project plan or a “to-do” list as a part of an old-school sales process.

Sadly, many marketing and sales teams still follow this formula. While that was acceptable in prior years, today, building buyer personas should always be informed by market research.

What is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a fictional character that represents your ideal customer. Buyer personas help marketers gain visibility into their target customers’ thoughts, ideas, conversations, pain points, and values to improve how they develop products, go to market with marketing messages, launch campaigns, and ultimately sell products.

A buyer persona can be applied to any market, industry, vertical, or region. Some marketing and sales teams create multiple buyer personas based on product portfolios or use cases. This will always depend on each business and the different types of customers they serve. Sometimes, they may only create one buyer persona and add additional personas as new products or services are introduced.

A persona is a visual representation of a more extensive audience analysis. See below for three example buyer personas–C-Suite, Gen Z, and a Physician Audience. All buyer personas from primary research, web analytics, or social analysis should be informed.

Distinct Value of Buyer Personas and Brand Archetypes

Marketers create buyer personas and brand archetypes to understand audiences and brands deeply. At first glance, both may seem similar. In practice, they provide unique strategic insights.

As mentioned, buyer personas represent semi-fictional profiles of target customers informed by demographic, psychographic, and behavioral data. For example, “Tech-Savvy Tina” personifies a developer who loves innovative solutions and frequently shops online. Buyer personas illuminate audience motivations, pain points, conversations, and values. This enables tailored messaging and campaigns that genuinely resonate.

In contrast, brand archetypes are symbolic character models that encapsulate a brand’s essence. From Carl Jung’s framework, archetypes like “The Creator” or “The Rebel” reflect core brand beliefs and personality traits. Archetypes shape storytelling and forge emotional connections with audiences.

While buyer personas focus outward on customers, brand archetypes look inward to crystallize brand identity. Though distinct, the tools are mutually reinforcing. Buyer personas help brands serve audiences authentically. Archetypes ensure that service aligns with brand values. Together, they enable meaningful connections.

For marketers, neither tool alone is sufficient. Success requires applying both lenses. Buyer personas create external empathy and alignment. Brand archetypes provide internal clarity and purpose. Combined, they form the foundation for resonant messaging and powerful audience engagement.

What are the Benefits of Creating Buyer Personas?

Marketers have long relied on buyer personas to understand better their potential customers and how they can provide them with a better digital customer experience. There are several benefits to creating good buyer persona profiles, including:

• Improved Customer Communication: The most significant benefit is that personas enable a business to articulate its value proposition to its target audience clearly. If done right, marketing and the sales team can identify customer pain points and create messaging that addresses those concerns.
• Innovation & Product Development: The insights extracted from creating buyer personas can give product and R&D teams detailed documentation on new features or products they need to build. This approach can also help with decision-making and problem-solving across the business.
• Data-Driven Digital Marketing: Research and data should always inform a buyer persona. Marketers can create targeted digital marketing programs across paid media, search, content marketing, social media marketing, PR, and events by applying an analytics approach to mapping the customer lifecycle.
• The Sales Team Loves Buyer Personas: Ask any sophisticated sales team about buyer personas, and the response is the same: they love it. A buyer persona will give them insights into ideal customer pain points, the top channels they are using, and the target customer interests. As a result, integrating buyer persona development into the sales process will soon become a marketing best practice.

Buyer persona development can do more than provide insights into customer behavior. It is a business tool that can help educate the entire organization to inform product development and digital marketing strategies globally. Social media and content marketing teams also find buyer personas extremely beneficial to inform their programs when mapping content to the B2B sales funnel.

How to Create a Buyer Persona

Crafting a buyer persona is vital in understanding your target audience, allowing you to connect with them deeper. As mentioned, a buyer persona is a semi-fictional character that embodies the key traits of your ideal customer, constructed from thorough research and analysis of your existing customer base. As you strive to create a buyer persona, consider these crucial steps to ensure an accurate and comprehensive representation.

Begin by gathering data on your existing customers. Conduct surveys and interviews or analyze interactions on social media platforms to extract valuable information about their demographics, preferences, motivations, and pain points. Delve into the specifics, such as age, occupation, location, and lifestyle, as well as their goals, challenges, and buying habits. As you sift through this wealth of data, recognize patterns and trends that emerge, which will help you to construct a multidimensional persona. Including quantitative and qualitative data in your analysis is essential, as this combination will provide a more holistic view of your target audience.

Once you’ve collected and analyzed the pertinent data, synthesize your findings to create a comprehensive buyer persona. Give your persona a name and image to humanize them, fostering empathy and enabling you to tailor your marketing strategies better. However, remember that a single persona may not encompass your target audience, so consider creating multiple personas to represent diverse segments. Regularly revisit and refine your buyer personas as your business evolves to ensure their continued relevance. By carefully crafting these personas, you position your brand to forge meaningful connections with your target audience, ultimately driving greater customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Buyer Personas Deep Dive

First, it’s an expectation that marketers already have in-depth insight into their business, products and services, and the brand’s unique value proposition. They must also account for all the external factors out of their control. This includes competitive products and services, local, state, and federal laws (if applicable), changes in cultural shifts, and the constant evolution of customers’ unmet needs.

Assuming this is all accounted for, the buyer persona analysis can begin.

The definition of audience analysis is the process of using data and insights to identify, understand, and uncover the values, behaviors, affinities, attitudes, conversations, and patterns of your ideal customer. The analysis can extract data from primary research, web analytics, social media, or all three.

Specialized Audience

This approach for building buyer personas is ideal for B2B and technology companies. The process involves analyzing social media bios for target keywords, like a job title. This methodology makes it easy to find the C-suite, IT Decision Makers, Engineers, and Developers. Other specialized audiences include reporters, analysts, healthcare professionals, and business decision-makers.

Affinity-based Audience

This approach effectively finds different types of customers who share similar interests, affinities, attitudes, and beliefs. It could be as simple as building a target audience of customers who follow a particular brand on social media or have used a target keyword or hashtag in the last six months. A more sophisticated approach might include a few more variables, like potential customers who are inclined to travel, follow high-end brands online, and talk about going on vacation every summer.

Micro-Audience

These are smaller audiences (<500) built to help highlight what is trending among micro-communities on social media. The purpose is for real-time content marketing. The target audience is large enough to extract directional insights to create content yet small enough to create highly targeted creative assets.

The analysis involves affinity-based insights and compares it to an index (e.g., gen pop) to show the unique characteristics. It also interrogates social media conversations to understand better what trends and topics are top of mind for the ideal customer.

This approach was used to build the buyer personas below. But, again, while these can be used as a buyer persona template, the insights and analytics need to be authentic and align with audience relevance.

Buyer Persona Tools Provide a Head Start, Not a Shortcut

Creating detailed personas is essential for tailoring marketing to resonate with target audiences. Numerous software tools exist to facilitate persona development, from free generators to premium solutions. However, these tools only scratch the surface. Impactful personas require rigorous research and analysis.

Free Tools:

• HubSpot’s Make My Persona: Generates professional and customizable buyer persona documents with an easy-to-use template generator.
• Semrush Persona: A tool that creates customizable buyer persona templates, free of charge, with no limits on the number of personas. It’s especially useful for quickly assembling personas.
• Xtensio: A versatile free tool that allows users to create various shareable documents and presentations, including personas. It offers more flexibility than specific persona builders.
• ChatGPT: A prompt that will create a persona based on what you sell and what you sell to.

Paid Tools:

• Upcloseandpersona: This specialized persona creation tool lets you build individual personas or use sample templates. It also integrates persona data for a comprehensive view.
• Akoonu: A lightweight persona builder designed for quick setups of basic personas, with features that facilitate easy sharing across a company.

Templates:

• Buyer Persona Institute: Offers a range of free editable buyer persona templates in PDF and PPT formats.
• Content Harmony: A free basic Google Doc template is provided to help you craft your text-based persona.
• Google: Google “buyer persona template,” and hundreds of examples exist.

There are no shortcuts to creating personas that deliver true competitive advantage. The companies with the most effective personas didn’t skimp on research or outsource the work. They explored their audiences themselves through direct engagement. Only this level of investment results in personas that evolve alongside your customers and become indispensable strategic assets.

ChatGPT Buyer Persona Prompt

The Difference Between Buyer Personas, Customer Personas & Audience Personas

Wow. Talk about a bunch of buzzwords.

In your career, you will come across various persona types, labels, and definitions, including audience, buyer, and customer personas. Each has a specific purpose and unique features, but they all share the same objective: to offer an in-depth understanding of your target audience. By exploring the details of each persona, you can decide the most effective way to apply them to your targeted marketing campaigns.

Sometimes, it’s just a matter of semantics.

Let’s start by looking at the audience persona, which covers the general characteristics of the people you want to reach. This persona type concentrates on your target audience’s interests, preferences, and media consumption patterns, allowing you to adapt your messaging and channels to suit their needs.

On the other hand, a buyer persona represents a more focused view of your target market, honing in on the individuals most likely to purchase your products or services. Buyer personas dive deep into these potential customers’ demographics, motivations, and pain points, allowing you to create targeted marketing strategies that resonate with their unique needs and desires. By understanding the nuances of your buyer persona, you can craft tailored sales pitches and promotional materials that effectively convert prospects into customers.

Finally, the customer persona shifts the spotlight to your existing clientele, concentrating on their experiences, satisfaction levels, and expectations. This type of persona seeks to uncover insights into your customers’ post-purchase journey, identifying areas for improvement and opportunities for upselling or cross-selling. You can foster loyalty, encourage repeat business, and promote word-of-mouth referrals by nurturing a deep understanding of your customer persona.

While each persona type serves a distinct function, they share similarities in their construction process. It involves gathering and analyzing data from various sources such as surveys, interviews, and social media interactions. Additionally, all three personas aim to humanize your target audience, enabling you to forge meaningful connections that drive brand success. By comprehending the differences and similarities between audience, buyer, and customer personas, you can strategically apply these insights to optimize your marketing efforts and achieve your business objectives.

5 Buyer Persona Examples

Below are five examples of buyer personas created using customer insights. Before we get into the specifics of each persona, let’s explore the methodology. Feel free to use these as buyer persona templates.

Fitness Enthusiast Buyer Persona Example

The ask was to build a buyer persona of fitness enthusiasts. The target customer profile was women between 25-35 years old.

The analysis starts with a name, occupation, location, marital status, and a brief bio. Besides the persona name, everything else is informed by social analytics and insights.

The preferred social media channels are based on the percentage of the audience that follows each channel and how often they cross-link their social profiles.

Purchase influence factors are based on how this audience is influenced to purchase products and services. These are not mutually exclusive. As you’d expect, this audience is highly influenced by friends and family. They are loyal to specific brands and make purchase decisions based on product utility.

The top interest section is based on a pre-defined taxonomy of social media handles categorized into different topics. For example, if a high percentage of the target audience follows travel-specific handles like Southwest, Travelocity, Condé Nast Traveler Magazine, or a set of travel influences, they would be classified as interested in travel.

Fitness Enthusiast Buyer Persona Example #2

This second buyer persona is from the same audience but with additional conversational insights—the analysis involved looking back at the last 12 months of the audience’s social media conversations.

The conversational insights reflect the topics and sub-topics most important to fitness enthusiasts, clustered by keywords and phrases. The size of the color-coded sections is significant because they represent conversational volume. The larger the area, the larger the volume of conversation.

The key takeaway of this analysis is that topics related to community and mental health represent about 50% of this audience’s conversation.

Additionally, fitness, family, and friends represent the rest of their conversation. Also, by drilling down to the second and third layers of each topic, marketers can uncover the context of the conversations and identify potential white space. This approach gives marketers actionable insights without reading thousands of social media posts.

Commercial Real Estate Buyer Persona Example

This persona is based on an audience of commercial real estate agents and is constructed slightly differently than the two fitness personas above.

The demographics, unique media preferences, and brand affinities are pulled similarly, but some data points below should be addressed.

The way to read these numbers is that commercial real estate agents are 6.3x more likely to read the LA Times when compared to an index. In this case, the index is the general US population. But it can also include a general business index or other audience. This type of information uncovers the interests, characteristics, and affinities that make an audience unique.

The audience persona cluster on the right comprises the audience segments that comprise the entire commercial real estate agent audience. These segments were identified based on a job title. This takes the data one layer deeper, providing more unique insights. It might make sense to analyze each segment in many cases to understand the affinities and characteristics that make them unique from the other segments. This would help marketers create laser-focused marketing messages targeted toward each audience group.

IT Decision Maker Buyer Persona Example

This is an example of a B2B persona labeled the CIO, one dimension of IT decision-makers. It doesn’t matter how the persona is labeled if audience insights inform it. For example, depending on the research design and taxonomy, an analysis can start with the IT Decision Maker as the larger audience profile and then be segmented based on various titles like the CIO, Head of IT, Director of Ops, etc. This type of analysis can uncover the unmet needs of each target customer and help craft marketing strategies tailored to each one.

All the information collected was done like the personas above. In this case, the top social media channels, purchase drivers, media affinities, and conversational analysis are included in this buyer persona template.

Software Developer Buyer Persona Example

This audience persona was built using highly targeted keyword Boolean searches of social media bios. We used keyword searches like “programmer,” “engineer,” and “developer.”

This audience persona maps the buyer’s journey, top analyst firms, and the top shared research by software developers. Lastly, the persona maps top media affinities, conferences, and podcasts.

Banking Executive Buyer Persona Example

This audience persona was built using highly targeted keyword Boolean searches of social media bios. We used keyword searches like “EVP” and “VP” and combined them with keywords like Bank or Credit Union.

This audience persona maps the buyer’s journey, top analyst firms, and the top shared research by software developers. Lastly, the persona maps top media affinities, Clubhouse Rooms, and podcasts.

Using Primary Research to Create a Customer Persona

Apart from social analytics, other sources can contribute to creating customer personas. Ideally, you should combine social analytics with primary research for more comprehensive results.

Consider the insights gleaned from Resonate’s State of the Consumer 2022 report. This report offers a glimpse into current customer sentiment and presents three customer personas:

1. The Overwhelmed Customer: This persona juggles career, workplace demands, and parenthood.
2. The Influenced Customer: This persona is strongly impacted by TikTok and Instagram and the influencers who populate their feeds.
3. The Activist Customer: This persona values corporate responsibility and social justice.

The report includes a snapshot of demographic information and customer data points for each buyer persona, detailing information on gender, age group, and household income. While this information is useful to document, its practical application may be limited. However, merging primary research with social analytics can help you utilize demographic insights to build a social media audience.

Hundreds of reports are published annually informed by primary audience research and can be used to build a buyer persona. The key thing to remember is that the more data sources used, the more accurate the persona will be and the better customer engagement strategy you can launch.

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