How to Create a Buyer Persona for Your Online Business in 3 Simple Steps
A buyer persona is a semi-fictitious representation of your ideal buyer, which is useful for marketing, communication, and content creation strategies.
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Do you know what a buyer persona is and how to create your own?
If you’re thinking about creating and launching a product, or have already started working as an affiliate, you need to know who your buyers are.
Knowing who your potential or current buyers are can help you optimize your results and create more assertive content.
Creating a persona for your online business will help you speak directly with your customers, in a communication style they’ll identify with. It’ll also help you create content that they will find useful, which will build your authority.
A buyer persona is basically a semi-fictitious representation of your ideal customer. It includes characteristics, habits, desires, and common objections of your real customers.
In this article, we’ll teach you about personas and how you can create one for your online business!
In this post, you’ll learn:
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a semi-fictitious representation of your ideal customer.
It includes sociodemographic data, like age and location, as well as more specific information, like their job, their hobbies, their goals, and their pain points.
Creating a buyer persona allows you to speak directly with your customers. By imagining that you are communicating directly with them, you ensure that you communicate in a way that makes sense for your buyers.
For example, how you communicate with a 60-year old business professional will be different than how you communicate with a millennial. Establishing a buyer persona will help make it clear whom you’re communicating with.
What’s the difference between a buyer persona and target audience?
While similar, the terms target audience and buyer persona are different things.
Your target audience refers to the intended audience for your content or product. Target audiences are made up of general demographic data, like age, location, and socioeconomic status.
On the other hand, a buyer persona is more specific and represents a single, semi-fictitious person. In addition to the demographic data included in a target audience, this method will also include details about the persona’s life, desires, pain points, and objections.
In short, a target audience represents a general group, while a buyer persona is a specific person within that group.
The importance of a buyer persona
Creating a buyer persona has a very important role to play in your marketing efforts. It’ll help you attract the right people to your brand and speak to them in their language.
Before discussing how to create your persona, let’s take a quick look at why it’s important to create one.
Define your brand’s voice and tone
First and foremost, establishing whom your brand is communicating with will help you decide how your brand should communicate.
A brand’s voice and tone play a big role in how potential customers view the brand. With a detailed persona, you’ll be able to make sure you use language that your potential buyers themselves use.
You want your brand to be relatable for buyers, you want them to identify with it. Communicating with them using the right voice and tone ensures they see your brand as one that understands their needs.
Select the right communication channels
In addition to voice and tone, your buyer persona will help you decide where to talk to your potential buyers. There are countless ways and platforms to communicate with audiences, but not all audiences communicate with the same means.
For example, younger audiences prefer social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram, whereas older audiences may be more active on LinkedIn or prefer to receive email newsletters.
Regardless, conducting research for your persona will help you decide on the best networks and communication channels for your brand to use.
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Create marketing strategies
Similar to deciding communication channels, your ideal customer can help guide your marketing strategies.
An intimate knowledge of your buyers is crucial to outlining strategies and developing ads that will generate the best results.
Break down customer objections
You can use your in-depth understanding of your customers’ pain points and desires to communicate the benefits of your product in a way that will be attractive to them.
You can use your buyer persona’s life story to communicate the life transformation customers can expect with your product.
Ultimately, after creating your persona, you’ll be better equipped to break down customer objections.
3 simple steps to create your buyer persona
Creating a buyer persona essentially boils down to researching your target audience, and using your findings to create a description of your ideal semi-fictitious customer.
There are many ways to conduct research, and how you conduct yours will depend on your business’ stage. If you’ve already launched a product, for example, you’ll be able to gather data about your current customers.
On the other hand, if you haven’t launched a product yet, you’ll have to find other ways to gather information about your ideal customers.
Now, we’ll go over 3 simple steps.
Step 1: Conduct research
Even though a buyer persona is not a real person, it still needs to be based on real data. So, before anything else you need to gather data about your current customers, or, if you don’t have any yet, data about customers in your target market.
For sources, consider using your own customer data, conducting surveys, analyzing existing market research, or sites like Statista.
If you already create content but don’t yet sell a product, you can use your audience insights to gather data. For example, Instagram provides users with demographic data about their followers.
Use whatever sources you can find that make sense for your research. The idea is to gather as much information as possible about customers in your target market.
Step 2: Analyze your data
With all your data in hand, it’s time to analyze to begin creating your buyer persona.
The most important thing is to look for the most common characteristics in your target market. Remember, a buyer persona cannot represent every single potential customer. Instead, it needs to be a general representation of the majority of customers.
For example, maybe buyers in your niche range in age from 35-60 years old, but if 70% of buyers are between the ages of 45-55, your persona’s age should fall within that range.
Group common information and, if you notice more than one strong set of common traits, you may find it advantageous to have more than one buyer persona.
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Step 3: Create your buyer persona
Once you’ve completed your research and analyzed your data, you’re ready to create your buyer persona.
First, start with their basics. Pick a name and list their demographic data, like their age and where they live.
Next, create a story for your persona. Imagine what they would be like if they really existed. Write about their personal and professional goals, their pain points, and their objections.
Finally, you may find it useful to use a picture of your ideal customer to help you imagine them while preparing content, copy, and marketing strategies.
How to use your buyer persona
Once you’ve created your buyer persona, it will play a vital role in all of your marketing efforts and your business as a whole.
For marketing purposes, use your persona to direct your content creation strategy, communication style, and advertising efforts.
Create content that your persona will find useful or enjoyable. When writing blog posts, write directly to your persona. Keep your them in mind deciding where to reach your audience and post your content.
Your buyer persona can also help you think of future products to develop. What other pain points can you solve for your persona? What future problems may arise for them that you can start planning for?
In short, keep your persona in mind whenever communicating with your leads and making decisions related to your brand.
Time to create your own buyer persona!
Whether or not you’ve already launched a digital product, a buyer persona will help improve your marketing strategies and optimize your communication. It’s an essential step for selling your product and communicating with your audience.
Once you’ve created yours, make sure to use it while creating content and marketing strategies.
If you haven’t created your first digital product, make sure to check out this post for a guide on where to start.
*This text was originally posted in January 2017 and it has been updated to provide more accurate and complete information.
