Planning your next social media campaign?
Creating a layout for your new website?
I have just one question for you – Do you know who your target customer is?
Buyer Persona is a way of developing a deep understanding of your buyers. It provides you with rich insights about your buyers’ demographics, objectives, challenges, and motivations, which helps you create targeted digital strategies.
Does it mean Profiling your Buyers?
Unlike profiling, you are dwelling deep into your buyer’s behavior and thought process.
Do you create a semi-fictional representation of your buyers?
Buyer’s Persona are backed by extensive qualitative and quantitative research. It acts as a semi-fictional representation of your buyers.
To put in simple words, Tony Zambito (the founder and creator of buyer persona development) defines Buyer’s Persona as research-based representation of people who are likely to buy your product/service, why do they buy your product/service, what thought process and behavior pattern they resort to while buying your product/service and, when and where do they buy your product/service.
By creating 3-4 Buyer’s Persona, one can scale over 90% company’s revenues just by creating content or visuals according to needs, behavior, issues, and concerns of their target audience.
Research
You need to dig out interesting and intricate details about your buyers to make your Buyer’s Persona look realistic. Research is the key to form archetypes of your buyers.
There are two ways to collect data:
Primary Research
Primary Research involves conducting Interviews or holding incentive based surveys over google forms, emails or calls. Head start to your data collection could be your existing contact base or taking feedback of your sales team. You conduct interview of your consumers, taking referrals and even through a third-party. Some companies use websites like Survey Monkey to keep a track of their existing customers.
Secondary Research
Secondary Research is using the data or studies based on primary research carried out by other companies.
With the boom in technology, you can get a better understanding of your buyers using Google Analytics or Facebook Insights. This will help to form a base to a well designed Buyer’s Persona.
Categorization
What to do with all the raw data you collected about your current or prospective consumers?
How to make it easy for your team to understand your data?
The next step is to analyze and figure out similarities from your data and form a draft persona based on:
Demographic details
Here you can include basic and brief details:
Age – child, adolescent, adult, old
Gender- male, female, transgender
Relationship – single, married, divorced
Lives – urban, rural, city, town
Income – poor, middle class, rich
Education level- high school, undergraduate, masters, Phd
Hobbies – sports, performing arts, fine arts, software related
Psychographics
The type of person, peculiar habits and their outlook towards the surrounding
Goals – to become a successful, to travel around the globe
Fear- losing a job, being bankrupt
Attitude- optimistic, practical, pessimistic, ideal
Personality- introvert, extrovert, ambivert
Online behavior – scrolling through facebook
Product/ Service
This mostly includes the buying habits
Frequency of Product bought – daily, weekly, monthly, yearly
When they buy your product – occasion, daily need
What is your product used for- at home, office at school or university
Helping in enhancing or solving their problems –
Communication Preference
How do they like to communicate?
Phone – Call / Text
Emails
Social media – Facebook Messenger, Instagram Direct, LinkedIn, Twitter
Acquire Information
Social media
Newspapers
Websites
Quotes
Include the mannerism and quotes you might have picked up when you surveyed or observed.
Phrases
Verbatims
Visual and Content Creation
Once you are done making a draft persona, you can make separate personas and assign names, such as Traveler Arya, Techie Harry or Graduate Sam.
Visual data enables your data to be loud and clear. Try to make your data more visually appealing by including infographics, graphics, avatars and many more.
You can also give a creative bend to your persona by using our free template.
Start creating your first buyer persona today and let us know in the comments about it.
Debbie Moran is a Digital marketing strategist with 5+ years of experience producing advertising for brands and helping leaders showcase their brand to the correct audience. She has been a part of RecurPost since 2019 and handles all the activities required to grow our brand’s online presence.