You’re ready to get your product to market, but who are you selling to? In this post we’ll take a look at how to leverage buyer personas and identify your perfect target audience.

First things first, what is a buyer persona? A buyer persona is a semi-fictional character meant to embody your company’s “ideal customer”. It basically serves as a personalized guide to your target audience based on research and data from your current customer base. The number of buyer personas needed varies from company to company but their format is generally the same.

What’s In A Buyer Persona?

Buyer personas are detailed profiles and stories about your target audience. You’ll want to write the “story” of your buyer in their tone of voice, do your best to personify your buyer in your persona profile. Here are some tips to get started:

• Give your buyer persona a catchy name, check out our example of “Marketing Monica”

• Get in depth with what your persona likes, for example: Marketing Monica always wakes up on time, she’s driven and passionate. She starts her day with a workout to her favorite Spotify list of 90’s jams and never misses her drive-thru Starbucks cappuccino on the way to work. She’s always busy helping co-workers, answering questions, and impressing her bosses. She’s a type A personality to the max. She enjoys work and is focused on climbing the corporate ladder. She prefers to communicate with her friends on Instagram and via text message over phone calls and emails. She’s super responsive to vendors and is always willing to hear about new products and opportunities to do her job better. After work she enjoys sipping sangria with her other single friends at rooftop bars near her apartment in Philadelphia.

• Use the voice of your buyer to capture their essence.

• Include details—it will help you get into the mode of your target buyer.

Why Are They Important?

Buyer personas are essential in every step of the customer journey. Personas help your team create relevant, targeted content based on the client’s specific needs and lifestyle instead of relying on general, unspecific marketing that is unlikely to make a connection.

These personas also help your team stay consistent with the messaging by allowing them to think like a potential customer and tailor the tone, call to action and communication channels to anticipate the buyer’s behavior.

How Do I Make One?

Because buyer personas are based off of extensive data, it is imperative that you gather as many details as possible—remember, you are crafting a story about your potential buyer. The ideal way to do this is to base personas off of your existing clients. Doing research on your existing database can help you develop an outline that will uncover shared attributes between customers. You should also interview your sales team and other client facing employees about their past experiences with customers to make sure your stories align with their impressions.

You will likely need more than one buyer persona. For example, if you’re selling to marketers, and small business owners you’ll need a separate persona for each target audience you’re trying to reach. You may also want to create personas for influencers too if there are other team members who play a role in impacting buying decisions.

What’s Next?

HubSpot has a great free template that you can use to get started, you can access it at blog.hubspot.com/marketing/buyer-persona-research, or if you’d like help creating one reach out to the Red Brick Partners team—we can help you get started!

References:

1. “What Is a Buyer Persona.” Buyer Persona Institute, 5 Nov. 2020, buyerpersona.com/what-is-a-buyer-persona.

2. “How to Create Detailed Buyer Personas for Your Business [Free Persona Template].” HubSpot Blog, 18 Jan. 2021, blog.hubspot.com/marketing/buyer-persona-research.