A buyer persona shows a glimpse into a high-value audience. It’s a snapshot of your customer.
Why this matters:
The more you know about your audience, the better equipped you’ll be to create programs and campaigns that deliver impact. It’s a fact.
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. And 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 should be informed from primary research, web analytics, or social analysis.
All buyer personas should be informed from primary research, web analytics, or social analysis.
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 clearly articulate its value proposition to its target audience. 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 represents a vital step in understanding your target audience, allowing you to connect with them on a deeper level. 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. It’s essential to include both quantitative and qualitative data in your analysis, 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 better tailor your marketing strategies. However, remember that a single persona may not encompass your target audience, so consider creating multiple personas to represent diverse segments. As your business evolves, regularly revisit and refine your buyer personas 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.
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 personas, buyer personas, 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 the interests, preferences, and media consumption patterns of your target audience, 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 the demographics, motivations, and pain points of these potential customers, 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. By nurturing a deep understanding of your customer persona, you can foster loyalty, encourage repeat business, and promote word-of-mouth referrals.
While each persona type serves a distinct function, they share similarities in their construction process, which 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.
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.
Here are three ways to build an audience of potential customers to inform a buyer persona.
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. The C-suite, IT Decision Makers, Engineers, and Developers are easy to find using this methodology. Other specialized audiences include reporters, analysts, healthcare professionals, and business decision-makers.
Affinity-based Audience: This approach effectively finds different types of customers that share similar interests, affinities, attitudes, and beliefs. It could be as simple as building a target audience of customers that 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 that have an affinity for 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 better understand 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.
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 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 buyer 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 is the audience segments that make up 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 buyer 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 for this buyer persona 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 Buyer Persona
Incorporating Primary Research to Develop a Buyer 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:
- The Overwhelmed Customer: This persona juggles career, workplace demands, and parenthood.
- The Influenced Customer: This persona is strongly impacted by TikTok and Instagram and the influencers who populate their feeds.
- 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.
Incorporating Primary Research to Develop a Buyer 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:
- The Overwhelmed Customer: This persona juggles career, workplace demands, and parenthood.
- The Influenced Customer: This persona is strongly impacted by TikTok and Instagram and the influencers who populate their feeds.
- 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.
FAQ
How often do buyer personas need updates?
Buyer personas are dynamic documents that should be updated as required. Updates may be necessary if a persona’s role evolves or other factors alter business interactions. Additionally, it’s wise to refresh personas when new relevant data from primary research or advanced analytics tools emerge.
Who should be in charge of creating buyer personas?
The sales team is responsible for implementing a strategy encompassing understanding their customer, but they are not solely responsible for creating buyer personas. These personas can be developed with or without sales team input. If they prefer not to have their target personas created by someone outside their department, they should collaborate with marketing and other teams.
Is it possible to create buyer personas using intuition?
Um, no. While it is possible to build a buyer persona using intuition, it is not recommended. The risk of error is high, as insights and data sources for creating these personas require extensive research and time. Utilize actual customer information to ensure accuracy and prevent potential pitfalls when crafting buyer personas.
Which team should be responsible for buyer personas?
An integrated marketing team should drive the creation of personas, potentially involving the PR team, sales team, and market research.
How many buyer personas are necessary?
There isn’t a definitive answer, but generally, more than one buyer persona should be created. Even if target audience segments are similar, they might have distinct preferences for interacting with a business. By generating multiple buyer personas, you can communicate your marketing message more effectively.
Is a buyer persona template helpful?
A buyer persona template isn’t essential, but it can expedite the process from a design standpoint. However, the output might be restrictive.
Will creating a buyer persona improve customer understanding?
Developing a buyer persona is a step in the process. When executed correctly, it offers insights into your ideal customer and purchasing preferences. The more precise this information, the greater the likelihood of connecting with prospects interested in buying from you.
What is the ideal length for a buyer persona profile?
A buyer persona profile should be long enough to convey the value they will obtain from engaging with your business. Avoid exceeding this length, as additional information can be presented about their company and job role. A persona should contain sufficient data to drive action.
Can you develop personas using job titles?
You can develop personas using job titles, but it’s important to remember that relying solely on job titles may not provide a comprehensive understanding of your target audience. Job titles can offer initial insights into an individual’s role and responsibilities within an organization. However, it’s essential to combine job titles with other information, such as demographics, preferences, motivations, and pain points, to create well-rounded and accurate personas. By incorporating various customer data sources, you can better understand your target audience and tailor your marketing strategies more effectively.
Can you use a buyer persona to influence brand health?
Indeed, using a buyer persona can impact brand health. A carefully developed buyer persona assists in grasping the needs, preferences, and motivations of your target audience. With this information, you can adapt your marketing and communication approaches to connect more effectively with your customers, enhancing brand awareness, affinity, and loyalty.
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