How to Create a Buyer Persona: A Complete Guide

Understanding your ideal customers is important, but it’s not easy unless you have data-driven buyer personas.

A buyer persona based on first-party, real data gives you a competitive edge over your competitors as it provides you with insights that you can’t find anywhere else.

You know what your ideal customers like, where they spend time, what sites they visit, where they live, what social platforms they use, what challenges they face, and much more.

How exactly can you create buyer personas for your business?

Let’s find out in this step-by-step guide.

What is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona (also known as customer persona, marketing persona, audience persona, or target persona) is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. It is a document that includes essential data about your target audience such as demographics. Buyer persona contains a lot of information about who your ideal customer is, interests, life goals, buying behavior, etc. This data is collected using primary and secondary data collection methods to create reliable personas that portray a true picture of your target audience.

Here’s what a buyer persona looks like:

An effective buyer persona is one that’s based on data. The more accurate the data is, the better.

At any given time, it helps you understand who your target audience is and how best you can target it. This makes customer personas a must-have for effective targeting for marketing campaigns.

Why Does Your Business Need Buyer Personas?

Marketing personas offer a wide range of benefits to your business. Here’s a list of the primary reasons why you should invest in buyer personas:

Better Targeting

Buyer personas improve targeting.

They tell you what your audience likes and dislikes, what touchpoints it uses, what type of content it prefers, its life challenges, buying patterns, and much more. You can use this data to fine-tune targeting across all campaigns.

For instance, you can refer to the buyer persona when setting up a Facebook ad campaign or when hunting for a blog to publish your next guest post.

Research shows that email marketing campaigns that leverage customer personas have a 14% higher CTR and 10% higher conversion rates than email marketing campaigns that don’t use buyer personas:

This is because buyer personas make your marketing campaigns extremely targeted and thus, the metrics improve significantly.

Improve Personalization

Customers expect a personalized experience and marketing.

A study by McKinsey reported that 71% of consumers expect personalization from brands, and when they don’t get the type of personalized experience they expect, up to 76% of these people get frustrated:

The type of personalization consumers usually expect includes:

• Easy website navigation (75%)
• Relevant product recommendations (67%)
• Tailored messages based on their specific needs (66%)
• Targeted promotions (65%)
• Milestone celebrations such as birthdays (61%)
• Timely communication (59%)
• Post-purchase follow-ups (58%)
• Personalization in all types of communications (54%)
• Behavior-based triggers (53%).

This type of advanced personalization can be done when you have accurate, updated data about your customers. In other words, you should have updated buyer personas and continue to add more data to them on a regular basis.

This allows you to manage and meet (and even exceed) your audience’s expectations.

With accurate buyer personas and the right tech stack, you can offer a personalized experience to your customers across all touchpoints.

Optimization

Conversion rate optimization is a core component of effective marketing. It is entirely based on data and buyer personas.

Buyer personas tell you what to include in a landing page or a squeeze page to improve its conversion rate. What type of offer to include, how to craft the copy, what type of image or video to add, and what color scheme you should use to persuade a specific customer persona.

It also helps you in optimizing marketing and advertising campaigns. You can refer to the marketing persona to check what marketing channel you should use to target a specific group of people. This pushes guesswork out of the equation.

Product Development

Customer personas help you improve your existing product and develop new products from scratch.

Since you get all the details from the persona on what key features your ideal customers like in a product, what they don’t like, how they use your product, and so on. This is all based on data you have already collected and added to the buyer persona.

By default, product-specific data isn’t included in customer personas. But you can easily convert a buyer persona into a user persona. A user persona refers to the representation of someone who has already used your product or service:

You can merge the user persona into your existing buyer persona by adding a relevant section that covers how a specific persona interacts with your product.

This’ll help you refine your products and services and will prove to be extremely helpful for product development.

Data-Driven Decision-Making

Marketing personas help you make well-informed, data-driven decisions. This isn’t just limited to marketing or sales, rather it covers your entire organization.

Research shows that 71% of businesses that exceed their annual revenue targets have well-documented buyer personas, and these companies are 7x more likely to improve and optimize their buyer personas:

One of the major reasons (among several others) is that these companies know their target audience much better than their counterparts. And therefore, are in a better position to make timely, accurate decisions.

For instance, a company that knows its ideal customers don’t use X as they are more inclined towards visual content. This company might not test or even touch Threads (that’s also a text-based social platform). It knows already that its audience isn’t into text-based social platforms.

On the flip side, its competitor that doesn’t use buyer personas might use Threads to interact and engage with its audience in hopes of leveraging a new and trending social platform. 

The use of data in making accurate and timely marketing decisions can’t be ignored.

The same goes for buyer personas.

How to Create a Buyer Persona: Step-by-Step Guide

Here’s a step-by-step actionable guide to develop buyer personas for your business:

Step #1: Customer Research

It all starts with research.

You need to kickstart the buyer persona development process by collecting all the available data from all the sources about your target audience and customers.

This includes existing customers, analytics, initial business research, secondary data sources, brainstorming, and more.

The purpose here is to collect as much data about your ideal customers as possible. Ideally, you should look for all the following information about your ideal customers:

1. Demographics such as age, gender, location, etc.
2. Psychographics such as values and interests
3. Behaviors like purchase frequency, needs, and average order value
4. Professional information such as job, business, responsibilities, industry, etc.
5. Pain points like issues and challenges they are facing and how your product or service addresses those
6. Goals cover what they are trying to achieve in their life or organization and how your product or service relates to it
7. Hobbies and interests such as activities they perform or have an interest in.

The three major sources of data you should use at this stage include:

1. Analytics
2. Competitors
3. Secondary data.

Let’s look into each in detail:

1. Analytics

This is for businesses that have existing customers. If you don’t have existing customers and you are new, skip this and move to the Competitors section below.

Data from existing sources and tools works best as it’s highly reliable.

If you have a website, check its analytics (e.g., Google Analytics). Analytics tools provide lots of useful and authentic data about who your ideal customers are. This is the type of data you can trust.

Similarly, you can use social media analytics of existing accounts of your business. This will provide you with data on demographics and other key variables.

Meta Insights, for instance, provides you with demographics data on age, gender, location, and a few other key variables:

Tools and apps you use, such as CRM, email marketing software, customer support platform, or any other, will offer heaps of data about your ideal customers.

You need to collect and compile key data points for major variables (as discussed above) from all the existing sources.

2. Competitors

You also need to look at what your top competitors are doing. You can’t check their buyer personas, but you can get an idea of their primary target audience, its demographics, and other key details.

This helps you collect authentic data about your primary target audience.

The first step is identifying the right competitors.

Any competitor who has the exact same target audience as yours should be your first priority (known as a direct competitor):

You need to find direct competitors who have the closest resemblance to your brand.

Once you have the list, move to the second step where you need to figure out what type of audience they are targeting. You can use different tools for it, such as Semrush and SpyFu. You also need to spend some time on manual analysis.

For instance, Meta Ad Library is a decent source where you can find ads from your competitors and see what type of offers, ads, and features are getting the most engagement. An ad that’s running for a few months is likely converting well for your competitor. Analyzing it will help you find out more about their audience (which is also your audience).

You can use SpyFu (or any other competitive analysis tool of your choice) to find out more about your competitors. SpyFu, for instance, has a PPC Research feature that allows you to see Google Ads of your competitors, keywords they are bidding on, estimated ad budget, PPC clicks, and a lot of other PPC data:

The type of data you can collect from competitor analysis includes:

• Content formats
• Touchpoints and marketing channels
• Top keywords
• Type of content being published
• Product, product features, and pricing details
• The platforms and tools they use
• Demographic details of their audience.

3. Secondary data

You also need to collect data from secondary sources. It’s any form of data that’s already collected by someone else.

The best sources of secondary data include:

• Online databases
• Government and third-party surveys
• Administrative records
• Public records
• Academic journals
• Reports by institutions and governments.

For instance, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics is a great source for all sorts of professional data. Similarly, you can refer to reports from reliable institutions to get insights on relevant data within your niche.

You can collect demographics and professional data easily from secondary sources.

There are some niches where you can easily find lots of secondary data, whereas there are others where you might not find any. It depends on your sector, industry, and niche.

Step #2: Segment Customers

Once you have collected enough data about your primary customers, it’s time to create segments.

Identify common patterns and divide your customers into different groups based on shared characteristics. Each of these segments works as a standalone buyer persona, so make sure each segment is distinct from the others.

For instance, you can create a segment for self-employed males, one segment for females who run a home-based business, and another segment for small business owners for your finance mobile app.

Each segment should be different with its unique characteristics and variables. That’s how you can target it easily.

You might have to remove and merge several segments before you get to formalized segments.

Step #3: Define Broad Buyer Personas

Once you have the segments, you are all set to create broad buyer personas as you have the necessary data to do it.

Each segment should, ideally, act as a standalone, unique buyer persona targeting one specific audience group. If this isn’t the case, you should merge and tweak segments.

You can use an online free buyer persona template to do it such as HubSpot or Semrush. Or, you can download a free template like this and add details:

Tools like Canva also offer free, editable buyer persona templates where you just have to fill in the details.

There are a lot of options to choose from.

Here’s what you should do to define your buyer personas:

• Give a name to each buyer persona that represents the persona
• Add all the relevant information in each persona
• Add more sections and fields if needed
• Define multiple buyer personas
• Make sure you have at least one persona per target group
• Each persona should have a name, demographics, psychographics, behavior, challenges, interests, professional details, and content and marketing preferences sections. Add more if you have the data.

Step #4: Collect Primary Data

Once you have broad buyer personas, you need to beef up by adding more data.

You have two options at this stage:

1. Use the broad buyer personas and refine them without adding more data to them
2. Collect primary data from your target audience and improve personas.

Most businesses go with option 1 as it’s cost-effective and an easy route. The downside in this case is that your personas lack primary data (which makes them accurate and reliable).

Primary data refers to the data collected from the original source (in this case, your target audience). This data provides the best results as it’s highly reliable and accurate.

You reach out to your ideal customers and collect data from them directly through surveys, interviews, quizzes, etc.

This requires extra effort and resources, but it is the best and the right way to build buyer personas that work.

You need to collect primary data from a small sample of your target audience. You can conduct surveys to verify existing data and to add missing data.

If you need more insights, consider conducting interviews. The issue with interviews is that they require advanced analytics techniques. You have to transcribe interviews, run analytics like thematic analysis, generate themes, and decode qualitative data into quantitative data.

It’s best to stick with surveys as they are cost-effective, easy to administer, and straightforward for data analysis.

Primary data collection helps you capture more details that are usually not available otherwise. And you get the flexibility to ask any questions you like to add to your buyer persona.

For instance, you can ask what newspaper they read, what type of websites they visit to get information, average salary, favorite food, etc. It gives you a lot of options and helps you make buyer personas very detailed.

Follow these guidelines when for primary data collection for buyer personas:

• Select a representative sample
• Give incentives to participants to ensure their responses are accurate
• Ask specific questions from your target audience
• Collect missing data to ensure your buyer personas have all the mandatory information
• Cross-check and verify existing data.

Here’s a list of the top questions you should ask when collecting data from your audience for buyer personas:

Even if you have data on most of these questions, it’s still recommended to ask these questions when collecting primary data. This will verify your existing data and improve its reliability.

Step #5: Refine Buyer Personas

It’s time to refine and update your existing buyer personas based on primary data.

You need to strengthen the detailed buyer personas created in Step #3. Since you now have new data, add it to the existing personas.

The idea is to reduce the size of each customer persona by removing unwanted information and retaining the most authentic information that you actually need for marketing.

Your buyer persona should be a small, one-page document that’s easy to read, understand, and share. Here’s an example of a perfectly crafted and designed buyer persona (that you should replicate):

This marketing persona has a well-defined name with distinct sections. Each section has its own subheading with relevant details.

That’s how your final persona should look like.

Here’s how to do it:

• Give a fictional name to your ideal customer. The name should represent and describe your ideal customer
• Add an image of what your ideal customer looks like. This should be a real picture of an actual customer (used with permission), an avatar, or a graphic. In all the cases, the image should represent your customer
• Avoid adding content in chunks rather, create separate sections for each variable. This makes it easy to read as you can quickly head to the right section and get relevant information
• Make it colorful with a focus on readability. You don’t need all the information on a persona all the time. You need bits of information based on a marketing campaign or project, so it should be easier for anyone to get the relevant information within a few seconds (as opposed to reading all of it)
• Give a unique, descriptive heading to each section
• Add content in the form of bullets (not in paragraphs)
• One bullet should represent one complete sub-variable
• Keep your personas in PDF and make them shareable.

Step #6: Use and Update

A buyer persona shouldn’t be treated as ‘just another company document’ – that nobody reads.

The reason why you created buyer personas is that they must be used across your business  (not just marketing). Once you have them ready, float them throughout your company and make sure they are used religiously.

Customer personas need to be updated regularly.

This is crucial.

As your company, products, and customers evolve, you need to update the information in your personas.

Set a specific time period, say 3 months or 6 months, after which you should revamp buyer personas with fresh data. This should be a complete redo from Step #1-5.

It’s important for a few major reasons:

• New data generated across your business
• Changes in customer behavior and preferences
• Technological changes that reshape how people interact with brands
• Changes in business priorities and objectives
• New competitors and changes in existing competitors and their policies
• Identifying new opportunities
• Proactive optimization
• Getting ahead of your competitors (competitive advantage)
• Seasonal changes to demand and customer needs
• New, emerging trends.

In the absence of updating buyer personas, you’ll realize that they fail to deliver any value to your business. And this isn’t just about minor tweaks, rather, it’s a full revamp with fresh, new data (including primary data).

Final Words

Buyer personas are a central part of your business. They help your teams across different departments to serve and interact with your ideal customers better.

From marketing to sales to customer support to product development to finance, there’s something for everyone in buyer personas. You’ll notice how easy it gets to understand your target audience and meet their expectations when you know them.

At the end of the day, buyer personas are all about data. And data never disappoints – I have firm faith in data.

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