Buyer Persona Definitive Guide

What is a buyer's persona?

A buyer persona is detailed information about your targeted audience/customer. It describes your customer's behavior traits, age, gender, demographics, interests, hobbies and motivation.

Why is Buyer persona important?

In the whole world, different people have different mentality. So, Buyer persona will help you understand your prospective customer better.

This help to understand your buyer goals, pain points and challenges, customers' needs, & buying patterns to grow your sales.

Buyer’s persona help to your Sales & Marketing Team?

• To create a proper strategy for developing products and content.
• Polish their pitch to advertise your product to the right people at the right time.
• To Deeper understanding of your product and service compared to competitors.
• To understand customer’s buying behavior about your product.
• To save money and time.

You need to create more than one buyer persona for detailed targeting.

Overall, this helps to build trust and relationship with your prospects, elicit more purchase & ultimately convert into more loyal customer.

For Example:- A men's deodorant is only made for men. If you also target females, you definitely lose your time and money.

Types of Buyer Persona:

Majorly, there are two types of buyer persona which you can create.

1. B2B (Business to Business):
2. B2C (Business to Clients)

How to create buyer personas?

First, you do market research and gather all the important information related to your buyer persona.?

Lots of things are important for creating a buyer persona like Demographics, Profession, interest, Motivation, Psychology, Vision, etc.

Why do we use Demographics in buyers' persona??

This is a basic level of information your buyer must include in your buyer persona profile. Like Age, Gender, Location, Family status, Education,etc.

Let's take an example of men's perfume. Because this perfume is not made for girls.?

And if your location is India, then here perfume is used only by Adults and well-educated people.?

Your perfume sales depend on household income.

Question you Ask yourself when gathering demographic data:

1. What’s the buyer’s Age & gender?
2. What’s the buyer’s household income?
3. In which location do you provide service?
4. Education of your buyer?

Pro Tip:? Explain the purpose of your survey. Reach as many people as possible. And be sure to have a short survey for respondents to complete easily.

Important of Professional Status:?

This is important for both B2B & B2C? types of audience. Because specific types of product, tools, are only useful for specific types of industry/company.

• Job Title & Level (Executive, Manager, Expert, Specialist)
• Industry

For Example:?

• If you provide SEO tools then this is only helpful for SEO experts and professionals.
• If you provide a video editing tool then this is useful for video editors.
• Accounting software is useful for an accountant.

Question you need to ask?

1. What is the job title and level?
2. What is the company size and industry?
3. What tool and software do they use for work?
4. Who is the decision maker in their company?
5. What are the challenges at work?
6. How does the buyer define success in the workplace?

Psychographic, Goals, Beliefs:?

Psychology plays a huge role in understanding your personas buying pattern, value, beliefs and goals.?

Also, help to define what words we use in our sales copy or images.

• Personal Goals/professional goal
• Beliefs & Value

For Example:

Personal goals people want to achieve are marriage, car, travel, good family, childs, etc.

Professional goals people want to achieve like promotions, start a business, growth, etc.

Psychology: If your product is cheap and average quality then a high income person will not prefer to purchase your product.

If a person believes that offline products are cheaper than online products.

Buyer believes the doctor cannot lie.

Questions you can ask buyer?

1. What are the buyer’s career and personal goals?
2. In which things are buyer beliefs?
3. How do your product & service help to achieve their goals?

Pain Points & Challenges

This is the most important point for your sales, your services and products to improve your businesses.?

Because every person buys products and services to solve our problems.?

Find your customers' pain points & challenges they face. And develop a most relevant solution.

• Biggest struggle and Pain points
• The obstacle to become achieve their goals
• Irrational/rational fear

For Example:?

The software does not provide required options to a SEO expert, Accountant, developer, and editor.

Suppose a student wants to become a developer. So, he is trying to find the best institute to learn to program.

Question for ask with your buyer

1. What are the buyer’s biggest pain points?
2. What are the buyer’s most common objections?

Importance of Influence, Motivation, Networks, and Information Source

This knowledge helps to find the interest of your buyer.

This is also very powerful to sell your product and service. To Identify your buyer’s journey, discover who they listen to, who they trust, and on which platform they spend most of their time.

• Preferred Blog, social networks & website
• Favorite Media(digital or print)
• Influencer and thought leader they trust & look up to
• Favorite events and conference(online & offline)

For Example:

A person wants to make a good designer. So, he follows these guys who have already become a designer. and looks at their struggle for inspiration and their networks and information sources.?

Questions for ask

1. How tech savvy is the buyer?
2. Which social networks does the buyer prefer?
3. How does the buyer prefer to communicate?
4. Do you have hobbies and interests?
5. How do they get information?

Purchasing Process:?

This is also an important concept to create a buyer persona. This is mostly applicable for B2C type persona.

For Example:- Some people check products online first, then go to buy offline. It depends on the level of satisfaction.

Question:

• Where do they go to purchase or research products, first?
• Is a person active on social media?
• What do they prefer to read like magazines, blog, newspapers, TV, youtube?

Negative Persona:

What is it

A negative buyer persona helps to exclude those people who are not a good fit with your product & service.

It represents “a collection [of] behaviors, demographics, and real life scenarios that disqualify [leads] from your pool of happy, paying customers”.

Why is it important:

A negative buyer persona is important because

• This helps your sales and marketing team to exclude not good fit persons with your product and service.
• This helps to reduce the average cost of acquisition.?
• Prevents wasted time/money targeting the wrong people.

Let’s take some examples to a better understanding of the different type of persona

First, we take an example of B2C Buyer personas. Here are 2 image which help to understand the buyer persona.

The below image helps to understand the B2B buyer persona.

This image of a marketing manager in a software & technology company.

Difference Between Ideal Customer and Buyers Persona:

An Ideal customer is perfect for your business, company or organization level. To define your ideal customer you include budget, revenue, company size, location, product and service limitation.

A buyer persona describes the characteristics of an individual sales prospects.?

In this you can include demographic, pain point, challenges, goals and personal value.

Rather than only focusing on pain points, also understand all key decision makers.

A buyer persona includes more details about your prospect than Ideal customer profile.

How to Find Data to Create a Buyer's Persona?

To create a Buyer persona, you need to gather all the information about your prospect.?

You can get data from two directions: Market Research & Exiting Data Customer

Take Interview of your audience

Get Data From Sales Team

Gather insight from related businesses

Gather Data From Market Research: We can use different tools for researching our buyer persona.

Like Buzzsumo, SEMrush, Ahrefs, Google, Surveys

We are trying to create some types of people's buyer persona.?

Find right interviewer for research buyer persona

This is most important that you need to find the right interviewer to establish your buyer persona.

Here, I discuss some ways to find an interviewer.

Reach your current customer:-?

Your existing customer is the right choice to start an interview because they already use your product and service.?

Don’t waste your time talking to your happy customers.?

Find customers who are unhappy or less happy with your product. They will show your product mistakes.?

Let's take the example of less happy customers. Maybe your product is difficult to use, too technical and doesn't address customer needs. So, you reach out to these customers and take an interview to solve their problem.

Because less happy customers may leave your product or become a loyal customer

Use your prospects:?

Take interviews of those people who don’t know or less know about your product. You can tell benefits and pitch for your product and generate lead from this.

Talk with referral customer

Use your existing customer, coworker, social media contact to find people for an interview. They probably trust you because you go through a referral.?

Also, you can try a third-party network for interviews.

Tips for effective interview

• Give reason & incentives to participate in an interview (If they don’t have a relationship with you).
• Be clear with your non-customer that this is not a sales call. Tell them that you’re doing research and you want to learn their lives, job & challenges.
• You make it easy to say yes by choosing their timing. You can suggest the timing but be flexible.
• You go on interviewing until then you start to accurately predict what your interviewer is going to say.
• Make a list of all questions you want to ask with interviewers.