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Clarify the process of creating a detailed buyer persona

Written by Dorina Anton | Jan 10, 2020 3:03:43 PM

In college, I always heard that good marketing means knowing your target audience at a granular level. It was easy to fill out the information in a template about the age of the audience, location, income, professional level, and studies. But the rest of the “granular level” seemed like a mysterious journey that only the most experienced marketers could achieve. The actual punctual process escaped my understanding.

In this article, I’ll guide you through what steps you should undertake to build a detailed buyer persona for your digital strategy. I will also offer you an example of a completed buyer persona template and even what questions to ask to gain data.

What is a buyer persona?

Later on, I stumbled across the concept of buyer personas. To give a simple definition for this:

A buyer persona represents a detailed description of your target audience. It encompasses demographic and psychological data, as well as challenges, dreams, aspirations, and any other relevant information.

What’s the point of creating a fictional character, you might ask?

  • Your business solves a problem/challenge for people that need your product;
  • You can offer tailored deals, based on all the people that fit a specific buyer persona;
  • It gives direction and clarity for the efforts related to acquiring new customers.

Mapping out a detailed buyer persona isn’t an effort that only the marketing department should do. Buyer personas should be implemented across the entire company; your employees should be aware of what is the general profile of your customers.

How to create a detailed buyer persona

We are happy to share with you our buyer persona process. Here is a process built over more than 10 years of developing marketing strategies for tech businesses:

  1. Pick out a person responsible for overseeing all the activities that lead up to your final buyer persona profiles;
  2. Identify what challenges your company seeks to solve for your target audience. After this, outline the broad categories of people for each persona;
  3. Gather data about each group of personas through multiple sources and filter out the information so that you gain an accurate representation of your market:
    1. Interviews with potential and actual clients;
    2. Behavioral trends of your industry’s buyers;
    3. Discussions with the sales team;
    4. Feedback from each department that could deal directly/indirectly with your clients.
  4. After you gather all the data, read everything, digest, analyze, and document the common patterns that emerge. Segment the data into different profiles. Figure out why some people are responsive to your marketing campaigns, and some are not. Understand why they accept or not an offer. Discover where you can find them, identify what kind of messages and conversations you should create with them and so on;
  5. After you checked out the research phase, you should move on to the creation of the buyer personas. We add all of the filtered information into a predefined template. By doing so, a semi-real representation of your target audience is created - one that has challenges, goals, and needs. This becomes your persona’s story, which will make it relatable for all the people involved in the interaction.

Now let’s take a practical example from a recent client and build its persona.

Let’s say you are the Marketing Manager of a tech company with competencies in the web industry & server management. Your company offers a complete management system for web servers, and you need to map out who your target audience is.

After you gathered enough information from the current and potential clients of your company, you might notice the following possible pattern:

  • Targeted role: IT director
  • Industry: Financial
  • Company size: large companies / enterprises
  • Region: USA
  • Age: 35-44 (maybe even older)
  • The income of an IT director: $122,000/year

Moving forward and adding all the distilled information into your template, you end up with a very detailed buyer persona (as you can see below). It gets more natural to try to craft promotional messages, emails, marketing flows, and sales processes when you have such an elaborate description.

 

 

Questions to ask to build a detailed buyer persona

Asking questions and many “Why?”s is the key to understanding the motives behind decisions. We created this list of inquiries that we always seek to fill out when building buyer personas for marketing strategies:

  • General
    • Name (with an avatar/face to make it more human)
    • Description (company role, size of company, industry)
    • Goals the persona has to achieve in the workplace
    • Challenges that the persona deals with when trying to achieve its goals
  • Demographic information
    • Age
    • Income range
    • Education
    • Location
  • Their Story
    • What do they do, and what do they need to perform in the business?
    • How would the persona describe itself?
    • What does a day/week look like in its life?
    • Where does your persona go for information (list all kinds of sources from your research for this profile)?
    • What are his/her pain points? What problems are they struggling with that you can help solve?

Filling out all this information will give you and everyone that deals with this type of customer a more precise understanding of what interests them, why they are reluctant to buy products, and what you should prove to them for them to become your client. Of course, always keep in mind to pay attention to the potential customer and notice if there are other challenges that they are facing that your products could solve.

Final thoughts

Keep in mind that adaptation to the customers’ needs is critical in today’s economy when selling something. If you need to understand and create a detailed buyer persona for your business, our team of consultants is delighted to help you. Get in touch with us, and let’s understand together your target audience.

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