How to Create a Buyer Persona for Your Business Skip to main content

How to Create a Buyer Persona for Your Business

Avatar... That's the word for it.

I'm not talking about element-bending character here. Avatar means a buyer persona. Yes, your target audience, your ideal customers. What they look like, what they like, problems they're facing, things they desire, and so on. A fictional character that you create, give a name, attach a personality, and sometimes even a face. This enables you to remember that you're dealing with humans like yourself that have interests and desires. It is possible that you'll need more than one persona since your business could be targeting various kinds of people.

How does this concern you

Your buyers/customers/clients are the reason you have a business. If you don't know what your customers want, you need to find out now. Having a buyer persona assists you in creating content that'll target and benefit your target audience. Luckily for you, I've got a list of things to help you create that persona. Follow me until the end...

1. Ask: Research never hurts, especially in business. Whatever persona you create should be based on real-life data, not your imagination. The necessary data can be gotten through the analytics of social media and search engines from already existing customers. Information like age, location, and interests are usually on these platforms, and these are some of the things required to create a buyer persona. 
Research also involves studying your competitions. You will always learn something from them.

You can click here on the 20 Questions to Ask When Creating Buyer Personas

2. Listen: Just like in every relationship, listening is important in business. You can't get information just because you asked. You can only receive feedback by listening. Listening in this case doesn't have to be physical. There is something called social listening, and it means paying attention to what existing customers are saying on social groups and platforms. You will find out what about your product is working for them, and what part needs improvement.

3. Collate: By now, you have asked and listened, it is time to gather every detail and make sense out of it. List out common interests, goals, accomplishments, and pain points. Take a closer look at your product/service, and figure out what solution you can provide to their problems.

4. Create: Finally, its time to have that avatar. The specific name, age, occupation, interests, goal, problems, social life, and so on.

To give this avatar a sense of reality, there are a few tools to check out to buyer persona creation. They include Xtensio's User Persona creator, Digital Marketer's Customer Avatar worksheet, Demand Metric's buyer persona template, Hubspot's buyer persona template, e.t.c.

Here's a typical example of a buyer persona:
Name: Muhammad Ajayi Ikechukwu
Age: 25
Location: Lagos, Nigeria
Relationship status: Single
Occupation: Fashion designer
Personality: Introvert, not active on social media, intuitive, and sensitive.
Goals: To have an online fashion store. To increase brand awareness and gain new customers.
Frustrations: Never excited about interacting with people. Hoping to get over the phobia of Technology.
And so on. 

Check out 7 Companies that totally 'get' the buyer personas here

The more specific the persona is, the better you can satisfy new and existing customers


Author: Halimat C. Atanda

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