HOW TO CREATE A DETAILED BUYER PERSONA

In the previous article of the marketing research series, we described how to start the research, how to analyze the market, you are going to enter, and how to analyze the competition. After a detailed study of your market, you learned how many people can become your potential buyers from an income point of view. Now, you need to study, who is your customer. In this article, we will describe how to explore your audience and create a buyer persona.

What is Target Audience

A target audience is a specific group of people, who are the most interested in purchasing your product because your product satisfies the needs of that group in the best way. To spend your ad budget effectively, all your advertising activities should be aimed at that group of people.

What is a Buyer Persona

The Buyer Persona (BP) is a singular piece of your target audience, It’s a fictional ideal customer, based on the generalized data from market research and information you gathered from real people through surveys, interviews, customer reviews, etc. Depending on the product’s specifics, you can have one or more buyer personas. Properly created BP will help you to create the most suitable advertising content, taking into account the specific needs of your customers.

How to create a Buyer Persona

So, let’s use the example with a high-tech pillow startup again. You can start with theorizing, but you always have to enforce your hypotheses with solid data. The main sources of data, except mentioned interviews and surveys, could be sociological and demographic reports from private and government institutions. Also, it could be medical journals and theses in our example case. These sources should give you basic information about interested people: age, gender, education, location, occupation, income, lifestyle, interests, and values.

For example, after collecting data, among everything you got the following information:

• most of those interested in purchasing some new innovative sitting item are young and middle-aged adults of both sexes;
• most of them have a sitting type of job — office workers, clerks, drivers, etc.;
• according to the Health Policy Institute of Georgetown University, 64% of adults have regular back pains and even missed at least 1 workday a year because of it;
• and from 30% to 50% of adults experience constant or periodical pain in their necks;
• 8 of 10 of the interviewed people expressed concerns about how their constant sitting jobs influence their health now and where it will lead in the nearest 5–10 years.

The next step is to create a detailed pivot table with all characteristics of your fictional customer with all the life details, occupation, pains, concerns, and interests, that are inherent in surveyed people. Typically, you will get data that could be segmented into several types of people (e.g., young adult women, male teens, elderly females, etc.), because there is more than one type of people, who would purchase your product. So each segment requires a separate BP.

Example of Buyer Persona

Let’s imagine Jane Doe, a young adult, a typical office worker representing one segment of your target audience.

So, here you have a detailed image of your ideal customer, whose literal pain your product could relieve. Now you know (of course, within our imaginary startup) which kind of people you have to focus your personalized marketing campaign.

For your convenience, we created a free-to-download Checklist for Creating a Buyer Persona. It will help you to compose your own buyer persona and don’t miss any points. You can download it for free by clicking 👉here👈.

Targeted advertising is a key to saving the ad budget. Because it’s always easier to sell something to a person, who really needs your product. Thus, your PPC campaigns on social media platforms will be way less expensive. Also, addressing directly to people’s needs will help you to build up trust and loyalty to your business and increase the likability of your brand. Gaining the trust of one group of people is way more effective than trying to attract everyone. And this one group will become your solid loyal audience, who, while being satisfied with your product, will be wholeheartedly devoted to it and will advertise it to their acquaintances and friends for free!

Having reliable information about the needs and pains of your customers from the Buyer Persona and combining it with the advantages of your product, you can go to the next step — formulate the Unique Value Proposition. UVP is the statement that clearly expresses your product’s benefits to potential customers. Which we will talk about in our next article.