Imagine this…..
You are sitting on your couch watching your favorite TV show, and then suddenly there’s a pause, the screen goes black, and boom, a commercial comes on. You quickly realize that it’s a good old-fashioned infomercial. The product advertised is something of virtually zero value or use to you. You are bored, uninterested, and desperately waiting for your show to come back on.
You see where I’m going?
Sadly, a lot of small business owners approach marketing this very same way. They try to sell to everyone in a generic and unremarkable way, hoping that at least one of those people will eventually purchase their products. But, have you ever wondered how top brands manage to convert an average customer to a complete evangelist of the brand? You guessed it. The first step is to know your customer – How they speak, behave, likes, dislikes, and above all, think about what they are passionate about and what ultimately motivates them in life.
Creating buyer personas for your ideal customers can help you save time and money while enabling you to speak directly to your customers in a more meaningful and compelling way.
What is a Buyer Persona?
According to Hubspot, A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. (Kusinitz, 2021)
As a small business owner, you interact with customers on a very personal level. You can identify those customers that are driven by discounts aside from others that might be seeking efficiency or top-level quality. These characteristics and motivators are unique attributes to every single one of the customers that frequents your brand. Understanding these differences will help you grow your business faster while creating loyal customers that will evangelize your brand everywhere they go.
How to create a Buyer Personas?
All you need is the current information you have about your ideal customers. As a business owner, you should have an extensive amount of knowledge about your most valuable customers. If you would like to learn more, you can always conduct a survey, run polls on social media, or collect feedback from them directly. Any information you may have at your disposal is extremely valuable.
First, let’s think about what makes your best customers unique. What do they do for a living? How much do they earn? What are their hobbies? Values? Education? Challenges?
Most businesses will have anywhere between three to five different buyer personas. For now, focus on creating at least three different types of buyer personas for your business. You can continuously develop more if you see the need to divide your audience event further.
Here are a few attributes to consider when creating buyer personas:
- Interests/Lifestyle – Sports, fitness, gardening, reading, movies, hiking, shopping, pets/animals, gamer.
- Demographics- age, gender, marital status, income, education, and employment.
- Challenges/Goals/Problems – What types of problems are customers trying to solve with your product or services? Save time? How do your product/services help your customers?
- Values– Environmentally friendly, vegan/vegetarian, pet lover, health, wellness.
- Social Presence – Do they frequent one or many social platforms? If so, which ones?
- Stage of life – Single, married, divorced, married with children, empty nester.
- Individual characteristics– Spending power, tech-savvy, seek luxury, experiences, self-care.
As you go through the exercise of writing down all of the different traits that make your top customers unique, you will begin to see patterns and similarities. This is called “ Market Segmentation”.
Market segmentation is the practice of dividing your target market into approachable groups. (Qualtics, n.d.) By segmenting your customers or audiences into similar groups, you will be able to create promotions, campaigns, and call-to-actions that are relevant, enticing, and engaging to your ideal customers.
Here’s an example of a completed buyer persona.
Buyer Persona created by CleverTap
To help organize your buyer personas information, consider downloading this FREE buyer persona template from Hubspot.com.
Other tips to help refine your business’s buyer personas.
- Get creative and give each persona a fun name to further solidify the essence of the customer. For example, The DINKs: Double Income No Kids, Tom The Traveler, The Vegan Millenial, etc.
- Use illustrations or images to showcase the identity of the buyer.
- Continue to add relevant information to your persona profiles as you learn new information about each customer segment.
- Rely on your buyer personas when creating promotions, targeted messaging, or launching and positioning new products.
- Continue to evolve and maintain your buyer personas. The more information you gather, the more value it will generate for your business.
What’s next?
Creating buyer personas to capture the unique differences between your top customers is the foundation of a successful marketing and selling strategy.
Continue to update and expand each of your personas as you learn more information or notice any changes in the market. This research exercise will help you stay on top of the competition. As the competition tries to attract everyone in a generalized way, your business will be able to speak to customers on a deeper level and attract them by understanding their values and goals.
References
Kusinitz, S. (2021) The Definition of a Buyer Persona [in Under 100 Words]. Hubspot. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/buyer-persona-definition-under-100-sr
Anonymous. (n.d.) Market segmentation: Types, benefits and best practices. Qualtrics. https://www.qualtrics.com/experience-management/brand/what-is-market-segmentation/
Karnes, KC. (2020) How to create a user persona (with examples). CleverTap. https://clevertap.com/blog/user-personas/
