What’s a buyer persona and how do you create one?

Regardless of your role, it’s critical to understand your target customers and exactly what they’re seeking in your product or service. 

Buyer personas make this a lot easier—if they’re accurate.

This article helps you create better buyer personas by explaining

• What a buyer persona is—and why they’re important

• How to collect the data you need to create effective buyer personas

• A 4-step process to create an effective buyer persona

What’s a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. 

‘Semi-fictional’ might be a more accurate descriptor, since buyer personas are based on the background, motivations, goals, and pain points of real customers.

Behind every good buyer persona is a wealth of quantitative and qualitative data gleaned from audience and market research. You can give your buyer persona a name, an age (or age range), an occupation, a location, interests, goals, passions, and pain points. 

Here’s an example that includes some of those requirements:

An example of a customer buyer persona (Source)

Every successful company will have multiple—potentially dozens—of buyer personas to refer to. There are very good reasons for that, which brings us to…

Why do buyer personas matter? 

Buyer personas give everyone in your organization the opportunity to understand and visualize the ideal buyer you’re aiming to attract. 

Unlike the complex mass of your customer base, personas are tangible targets on which to focus marketing, messaging and product development.

This makes buyer personas crucial for delivering personalized marketing and services, which is key to creating great customer experiences and fostering loyalty.

Personalization isn’t so much about targeting a specific individual as targeting a specific type of individual—and buyer persona types best define those types.

Personas allow you to tailor your ads, website, content, copy, or product to the preferences of your potential customers.

How to collect meaningful data for your buyer personas

To build an accurate (and therefore useful) buyer persona, you need to collect meaningful quantitative and qualitative data about your prospective customers—taking into account such information as their 

• Demographics

• Psychographics

• Buying habits

• Digital behavior

• Overall lifestyle 

Here are some suggestions on how to collect that information.

1. Conduct surveys

Surveys are one of the best tactics to gather information about potential buyers. 

Ask your target audience questions related to demographics, buying habits, pain points, and favorite companies.

While you could hire an agency to do this for you, these days, it’s relatively easy to send out surveys yourself, thanks to tools like Contentsquare and Google Forms, which let you design surveys to send via email, social media, web, live chat, and more.

For example, Contentsquare empowers you to launch AI-powered, customizable surveys (with a selection of more than 40 templates to choose from). 

Contentsquare helps you make better decisions with fast user feedback

2. Search for reviews about your product or service

While survey insights are priceless, a simple evaluation of online product reviews also reveals valuable information.

In addition to learning what people think about your organization, you’ll also be able to identify your weaknesses, especially in relation to competing businesses. 

Take a look at review sites like Trustpilot, TrustRadius, and G2 Crowd to see if there are any strengths you can build upon or weaknesses you can address.

3. Browse online communities

Besides searching for reviews, dedicate some time to browsing communities dedicated to companies like yours. 

In most of these communities, almost everyone is a valuable contributor, and their comments can be a useful source when developing a buyer persona.

More importantly, ongoing discussions usually reveal problems and issues with a company’s offerings, which should reduce the time you spend evaluating your target persona’s pain points. 

4. Tap into your analytics

Analytics tools provide a wealth of quantitative information about the individuals who interact with your company online—even if they’ve not yet made a purchase. 

Contentsquare autocaptures 100% of user behavior (including clicks, swipes, taps, scrolls, typing, and hovers) across your websites, apps, and other branded experiences—and gives you the tools to gain insights from this data.

It also allows you to segment behavioral data by your different types of users and compare them side by side—whether that’s

• New vs. repeat visitors

• Mobile vs. desktop users

• Loyal customers vs. churning users

This makes it easy to answer key questions, such as which touchpoints within a customer journey your buyer is most likely to engage with first and which cadences convert prospects to paying customers, helping you dial up the accuracy of your buyer personas.

Segment your audience to compare their behavior and impact on your KPIs

A 4-step framework to create buyer personas 

Once you’ve gone through the data collection process, you’ll have a lot of raw, insightful information about your target audience. 

The next step is to leverage your research to identify commonalities and trends, create at least 1 buyer persona, and share it with the rest of the team. 

Here’s a step-by-step overview of the process you need to follow to make it happen.

1. Create a buyer bio

It may be tempting to glance over or skip the bio part of your customer persona completely, but challenge yourself and give the persona a face that depicts an actual human. (Trust us: it helps.)

This includes a profile image, name, job title, and city/country where your persona is based. 

2. Jot down your persona’s preferences

This is where you’ll use the insights you obtained from those customer surveys to answer questions like

• What do your prospects expect from companies like yours? 

• What pain points do they need solved?

• How do they like to be addressed?

Read over your survey answers and write up the patterns indicating their preferences on your persona template. 

You can also write some of the answers as quotes to exemplify what your audience is concerned about. 

Additionally, you can draft a list of concerns to ensure your sales and marketing teams are ready to address them during their interactions with prospective customers.

3. Craft an elevator pitch

After your initial research, you’ll have uncovered what features interest your target audience, the language they use to discuss them, and what brands they’re already using. 

Use all these findings to craft an elevator pitch that positions your company in a way that resonates with your target persona. 

Do you sell enterprise management software? A social media tool? Then your marketing message can go into the nitty-gritty of your offering and deliver a consistent message to the customer. 

This also helps you ensure your sales and marketing teams are speaking your customer’s language at the different stages of their journey.

4. Document (and share) your personas 

Don’t assume everyone in your company truly knows your ideal buyer or is capable of retaining insights. Ensure you document your buyer personas. 

Creating, documenting, and distributing personas company-wide is necessary to ensure all aspects of your marketing are executed with the same approach. 

Plus, documenting personas is a rewarding activity that keeps everyone across the business informed about how your audience thinks, behaves, and makes buying decisions. 

The result: a systemized, proven marketing asset that helps you with your growth goals.

Understand your buyers (and their behavior) with Contentsquare

Really knowing your customers is about knowing what they tell you—through phone calls, live chat, and by email or, if you arrange it, via a survey or feedback form. And you need to listen.

Contentsquare’s Voice-of-Customer helps you gather feedback through surveys (including NPS® and exit-intent) and a feedback button—both of which you can place wherever you like in the experience.

Contentsquare also captures every aspect of your customers’ in-experience behavior (their clicks and scrolls), so you understand how they interact with your site and why they behave as they do.

Heatmaps let you see where users are clicking, tapping, scrolling, hovering, and typing