An important step in creating your marketing plan is understanding who your ideal customers are.

By understanding their goals, desires, wants and needs, this will help you market to the right people.

A few key things to know about your ideal customer is their age range, geographical location, their hobbies, information about their career, information about their family and what their personal life looks like.

Once you figure out this information, you can generate buyer personas and begin attracting the correct customers.

Definition of a Buyer Persona

A buyer persona is an accurate yet fictional description of who your preferred customer is.

This customer is created from a combination of information that is discovered via market research and preexisting data about your current customers. A buyer persona usually exists as a document describing everything about this fictional character and is used as a reference for all things related to marketing.

The amount of buyer personas to create depends on your business and can range from one all the way up to twenty personas.

Research

Before you begin to physically create a buyer persona you want to spend some time doing market research. By conducting research, you are able to gather the required information to help you build your buyer persona.

This portion of the buyer persona creation journey can feel time-consuming but remember that this is a very important step.

Some suggested methods of research include:

• Interviewing your target audience.
• Conducting surveys (via your website, email or in person).
• Talking to your team and collecting their feedback from sales and past experience.
• Studying behavioral trends from your customer database.
• Hosting a focus group.

Upon completion of your research, you should be able to identify patterns which, in turn, will help you to create at least one main persona.

Creation of a Buyer Persona

The process of creating a buyer persona is the stage where your research and creativity fuse together. These are just a few of the suggested items to include in your buyer persona. You can add any other information that you want and there is no right or wrong way to create a persona.

It’s ideal to try and limit this information to one page, so keep that in mind when creating this document.

The top five recommended components of a buyer persona are:

1. Avatar

One of the first things you want to do when creating your buyer persona is to select a name and photo/image to represent this customer. This name and visual representation of them will help guide you when visualizing who they are when creating a marketing plan.

A good idea is to pair the name of your buyer with a characteristic, trait or the industry they are associated with, which in turn will help you remember their name.

For example: Shopping Susan, Typing Timmy or Accounting Al.

2. Age and Education

Assigning an age and education level to your buyer persona will help you better understand who they are. This will also help you create marketing collateral that is targeted toward the correct age group and demographic.

Each age group and education level consume information differently and this will help ensure you are communicating the correct information to the right people.

3. Career

By defining the buyer persona’s career and position within their company, it will help you better understand the way they think. Getting inside the head of this persona to learn their daily behaviors at work is important.

What is their routine? How do they solve problems? How do they achieve goals? This portion of persona creation will help guide you in educating them why they need your services/products to achieve their goals.

4. Communication and Tools

How does your ideal customer communicate and what is the desired method of communication?

Also, what tools or software are required in order to complete their tasks? Some people prefer to communicate through email and others prefer meeting over coffee. Some positions require weekly reporting when others have monthly meetings.

This data is imperative because it will help you understand how their needs relate to your products or services.

5. Consumption Habits

Understanding where the persona goes to learn, further their education, develop professionally and where they get their information from is essential. Social media is used by many but so is print media.

Knowing this information will help you decide where your company should be more visible and guide you on where to spend your marketing dollars.

Buyer Persona Creation Templates

You can go rogue and get creative to build your own buyer persona document. Alternatively, you can use a pre-existing template or, even better, a buyer persona generator. The beautiful thing about technology is that there are a lot of free tools that exist that will help you generate your buyer persona.

There are three websites that offer easy to use templates:

Xtensio

Xtensio is a user-friendly platform where individuals and teams create and shareliving documents.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media management platform.

HubSpot

HubSpot is considered a leading growth platform that offers marketing software.

Conclusion

Creating buyer personas is a fun way to understand who your ideal customers are. This process can be creative and will help guide your marketing efforts in the right direction. Don’t be scared to continuously update your buyer persona(s) as your business grows and evolves.

You can always remove personas and you can always add personas. If you need help in creating your buyer persona, give us a call and we can help with that, so don’t fret.

Filed in // Brand Identity, Strategy