How to Create an Effective Buyer Persona

Connect Your Brand With Those Who Matter To Your Business

It is very common to find entrepreneurs in the health and wellness industries extremely inspired and motivated to offer a product or service that will make a difference in the lives of many people. Unfortunately, they have no idea how to approach the market or define their ideal client. 

Defining your target audience is one of the most important steps in creating your brand. We are tired of hearing that. The anxiety and the desire to finish the whole brand creation process and see the product/service ready to bring results has many entrepreneurs skipping one of the most important processes, which is to do intense research around their target audience.

In a short Google search to try to understand how to gain the ideal customer’s attention of your brand, you will probably find a multitude of content, which can often confuse more than help. And let’s be honest, you don’t need all this confusion to define your audience with excellence. What you need is a framework that is consistent and adaptable to your type of business. For this reason, we are going to provide you with a complete target audience audit and explain step-by-step how to successfully create the profile of your ideal client.

In order to gain clarity about your marketing strategy, you will need a well-defined buyer persona.

A buyer persona is a detailed description of someone who represents your target audience. This is not a real customer, but a fictional person who embodies your best potential customers’ characteristics. Identifying your buyer persona can help you be more accurate with your marketing efforts, increasing your engagement with your target audience. You will provide a better customer experience when you know what they’re thinking before and after the purchase. Your marketing team can create highly targeted content and put it right where your personas are looking.

Step by Step in How to Create an Effective Buyer Persona

1- Audience research

The first step will be to gather as much information as possible. You will need to learn all about your prospects and clients. What problems are your potential customers trying to solve?  What’s holding them back from success? And what are the barriers that they are facing in reaching their goals? One of the possibilities to collect this information is to conduct some interviews using your current customers.

2 – Having the customer as a priority

One of the most common mistakes when creating a buyer persona is to focus only on the business objectives. Remember that creating a buyer persona is about addressing customer priorities instead of your own.

3 – Get ready for the interview

Your buyer persona is a focused detail of your consumer; consider collecting details like:

• Background – Focus on topics that involve career, position, and family. This session is essential to understand how your customers’ typical days look and their current job and ultimate career goal. 
• Demographics –  These are questions related to age, gender, annual income, education level, and location. Try to identify what would make your customer more comfortable answering the demographic-based questions. For example, would they prefer to answer them over the phone, in person, or through online surveys?  
• Identifiers – Understand your customer behavior, communication preferences, and interests. Take advantage of the session to understand how your audience prefers to interact with brands, what they are interested in, groups they are a part of, books, and more.
• Goals – Have a deep understanding of what your customers desire and what they need. Find out what they think about the future and what their greatest passions and needs are. Discover their challenges by asking about their problems, annoyances, and pain points.
• Sales objections –  Identify what makes them hesitate before buying something. Questions should be regarding what he/she expects when purchasing something or what makes them give up on consuming a particular product or service. It can help you understand what the biggest challenges for your consumers are.
• How can we help – In this session, questions related to what they like or dislike about their last purchases can generate great insights into how you can better attend to your buyer persona’s desires and needs.

4 – Gather all the information

After collecting all this information, you can summarize the result in a template that best matches your buyer persona’s needs. You will give this customer persona a name and profession. Having the information about your buyer persona will help you target your ideal customer.

5 – How many buyer personas do I need to create?

There are no set amount of buyer personas that works best for all businesses.  In most cases, you must figure out what works best for your business. One of the biggest mistakes in creating several personas is that you won’t have a clear delineation between them all, making it hard to attract, engage, convert, and delight any of them.
If you’re thinking of creating more than one buyer persona, you should consider if you’re targeting different niches, one industry, or vertical. Most businesses should have at least a couple of buyer personas, but you don’t want to have too many, either.

Let’s use the CVS store as an example. They work with a variety of products and services to develop content that meets different needs. It is necessary to identify the possible buyer persona to tailor the marketing efforts according to the target audience’s needs. Using the examples provided, your business should create several different buyer personas.

Now that you know what the buyer persona is and what you need to create one, you are ready for the first step, which is to start the research process by gathering as much data as possible. To help you with this task, we have created a template with strategic questions focused on deeply understanding who your customer is, what their pains are, desires and motivations, and much more. In this template, you will find a complete table with questions separated from demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and motivational questions.