A Buyer Persona Guide to Supercharge Your Marketing
What is a customer persona, why you need it and examples!
Your product is not made for everyone, and it shouldn’t be! If you’re thinking, “But I want everyone to buy my products!” You, my friend, are going to lose sales and waste a lot of ad campaign time, money and effort.
Then, who is it for?
Knowing your exact customer segment (AKA customer persona, target audience) will help make every ad, post and webpage optimized for more sales and conversions. In fact, the more detailed and specific you make your customer persona profile, the better you’ll be able to sell.
Read this: 36 Reasons Sales Are Slacking
What Is a Customer Persona?
A customer persona is an essential marketing tool. It’s honestly the basis of everything.
Your customer segment describes a specific type of person that you want to target. This person is the perfect customer for you because you offer exactly what they need. Your product or service will drastically improve their life!
It’s an essential document (or maybe infographic) that tells your marketing team everything they need to know to create your ads. This guide streamlines your advertising budget so it’s more effective and gets you a better ROI on your marketing.
Not only can a great persona guide make your ROI more efficient, but it yields more sales and growth.
If your ads are optimized exactly to your target persona, they’ll go to your landing page and instantly see your value — boom, pow, purchase! Your ideal customer alias will feel like your business exists just for them. Well, as long as your brand copy is great!
Customer Persona Example for a Company That Sells Digital Marketing to Solopreneurs:
This is a fairly detailed customer persona profile. Once you’ve created this buyer persona, the most important thing to understand is how your company benefits them. That’s where you focus all your marketing.
How to Create Your Own Customer Segment
Your customer persona profile can be as detailed as you like. But, the more details you have, the better your marketing efforts can be. For the most part, both B2C and B2B buyer persona guides should have similar information.
Let’s talk about how to create your buyer persona guide! I even included questions to help spark some ideas.
Where to Find Information About Your Customers
Some of the information is completely made up — the picture, the name. However, most of the information in your customer profile should come from market research. Here are ways to find details about your target audience to create your buyer persona template:
Hire an agency to conduct market research
Take a survey of your current customers to gain insight about them
Run analytics on your website (through ethical means)
Hire a professional to help (marketer, maybe a business coach)
Think about your ideal customer — Who do you want buying your product?
What Customer Information to Include
Remember, more detail is better! Knowing who your target audience is personally and professionally will help you determine what they want, why they want it and how your product or service fits into their life.
Age: Try to hone in on a 1-5 year range. If you’ve got a wide span of customer ages, make multiple personas.
Name: Preferably first and last. Look up popular names based on the year this person was born!
Income: Yes, find a number, salary or hourly wage.
Location: Where do they work? Where do they live?
Occupation: What are they doing currently? What did they do before? Does their occupation match up with their career dreams?
Education and professional bio: Know what stage they’re at in their career. Are they entry-level or a senior position?
Martial and family: This dictates so many things like buying style and priorities.
Personality traits: Think about both personal traits and professional. Even if you’re a B2C, you may get insight if you know what type of work ethic they have.
Goals: Professional and/or personal goals. What are they working towards in 1, 3 or 5 years from now?
Pain points: What frustrates them? What problems affect their life? If they could change something to make things better, what would that be?
Motivations: Think about why they live, work and think like they do. Are they influenced by others? Do they have financial constraints that dictate their decisions?
Communication channels: Where do they get their information? How do they communicate? A younger audience may prefer social media and text marketing rather than a 65+ target audience.
Mantra: What do they live by? What’s one sentence that could be their tagline?
Preferred brands: What companies do they encounter almost daily? What types of brands are they loyal to?
Leisure activities: If you’re a B2B, don’t knock this one off your list. Knowing what a B2B client likes to do for fun could give you loads of insight!
Purchase channels: Know how they like to buy products. What if your millennial audience almost always orders online and you’re trying to target them in-store?!
Your benefit: The most important one! How you make their lives better. How you make their job easier or give them peace of mind. How your brand helps them finally reach their goals.
It’s quite a bit of work! Luckily, as a copywriter, I can help organize all this information into a clear and useful format. Contact me to get that set up.
When Do You Need Multiple Customer Segments?
If you can’t clearly define a character in your target audience, you need to split it into multiple types of buyer personas. But, if you’ve got 5-10+ customer profiles, then you may still be too broad.
Each persona should have distinct details about them. Think of them as characters in a great story. They have depth, history and desires that need to be addressed. A bride, groom and mother of the bride all want something different from an event planning service. A corporate executive needs different messaging than one of their delivery drivers across the country.
Templates and Tools for Creating a Customer Persona
There are so many templates and software that can create a visually-appealing buyer persona guide. However, even just a Word Doc will do. The bottom line is to obtain the information, create the character and be able to use that information as a compass in marketing.
A copywriter (like me) can help organize and create a persona guide designed to create targeted ads that resonate and drive sales.
I love Neil Patel’s resources. Check out his detailed article about creating accurate customer guides.
Target audience research guide by Hootsuite. They walk you through how to find the information you need.
Conduct research with Survey Monkey. If you need help creating easy quizzes with insightful questions, let me know!
