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How to Create a Buyer Persona

Create buyer personas and better understand both your current and potential customers. Use our buyer persona template to get started today.

As a business owner, you need to create buyer personas. Your buyer persona details your ideal customer and includes information like their demographics, such as their age, sex, employment status, and location. It's crucial for a business to identify its buyer persona to create marketing campaigns targeted directly toward its customer base.

You may know your target audience, but it might be broad, such as “females above the age of 20” or “males in the financial industry,” for example. Your customer persona goes much deeper than that.

A buyer persona tells the story of your customers, including not only their demographics but insights into their personalities. Your buyer persona tells you the wants and needs of your buyers so you can design your products and services for them.

But in order to create your buyer persona, you need to conduct thorough research about your target customers so you can identify exactly who your ideal buyer is. And you can use a buyer persona template to help you out. A buyer persona template will help you organize your research so that you can easily create your buyer persona to refer to when creating marketing campaigns.

To learn more about what a buyer persona is, why creating a buyer persona is important, and how to create a buyer persona template, continue reading this article.

What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is a detailed description of a person who's in your target audience. Your customer persona is not a real person but rather a fictional version of a person that is based on extensive research about your current target customers. A buyer persona can also be called a customer persona, user persona, audience persona, or marketing persona.

Your buyer persona represents your entire customer base with one person since it's impossible to get to know every single one of your customers. However, sometimes it's necessary to create multiple buyer personas, especially if you have a diverse product offering and a wide range of customers.

To create your buyer persona, you'll want to start by giving this fictional person a name and identifying their demographics, interests, and behaviors. Their demographics will include their age, sex, nationality, education, employment, income, marital status, and any other important information.

But you'll need to go a step further than that and also identify their goals, pain points, and buying patterns. In addition to just the facts, you'll also want to understand their motivations, desires, and beliefs. The more specific information you have, the more accurate your persona will be. With a comprehensive buyer persona, you can create effective marketing campaigns that are targeted specifically to people similar to your buyer persona.

Why is creating a buyer persona important?

Creating buyer personas is important for many reasons, such as:

Improving product development

When you understand your ideal buyer, you can create products that are designed specifically for them, which can help boost your sales.

With a buyer persona, you'll have a better idea of your customer's wants and needs, and you can change your products to reflect them and make any important developments based on feedback. You understand your customer's struggles, so you create a product that's aimed to fix them.

Building rapport with customers

Having strong relationships with your customers is imperative for any business. When you truly understand your customers' struggles and desires, they can feel more connected to your brand and become more likely to support you.

Creating a customer persona is a great way to build rapport with customers and strengthen your relationship with them. Your customers will appreciate the efforts you make to understand them, which can also help with customer retention.

Creating effective marketing campaigns

One of the main benefits of creating a buyer persona is that it can help you create more effective marketing campaigns. When you have an extensive understanding of your ideal customer, you'll know exactly how they get their information.

Is it from social media ads? Email marketing strategy? Or a combination of the two? Knowing your buyer personas can also help you identify the right keywords to use in your marketing efforts.

Lastly, having this information can help you create customer-centric content that is relevant to your customer's wants and needs.

Understanding customer behavior

Understanding your customer's behavior is essential for all marketing efforts.

Where do they get their information? What social media apps do they use? What topics are they interested in?

These are just some of the many questions that you'll need to answer in order to have a complete understanding of your customers' behaviors. With behavioral targeting, you can create stronger marketing campaigns that are based on your target audience.

  • Improving product development: When you understand your ideal buyer, you can create products that are designed specifically for them, which can help boost your sales. With a buyer persona, you’ll have a better idea of your customer’s wants and needs, and you can change your products to reflect them and make any important developments based on feedback. You understand your customer’s struggles, so you create a product that’s aimed to fix them.
  • Building rapport with customers: Having strong relationships with your customers is imperative for any business. When you truly understand your customers’ struggles and desires, they can feel more connected to your brand and become more likely to support you. Creating a buyer persona is a great way to build rapport with customers and strengthen your relationship with them. Your customers will appreciate the efforts you make to understand them, which can also help with customer retention.
  • Creating effective marketing campaigns: One of the main benefits of creating a buyer persona is that it can help you create more effective marketing campaigns. When you have an extensive understanding of your ideal customer, you’ll know exactly how they get their information. Is it from social media ads? Email marketing? Or a combination of the two? Knowing your buyer personas can also help you identify the right keywords to use in your marketing campaigns. Lastly, having this information can help you create customer-centric content that is relevant to your customer’s wants and needs.
  • Understanding customer behavior: Understanding your customer’s behavior is essential for all marketing efforts. Where do they get their information? What social media apps do they use? What topics are they interested in? These are just some of the many questions that you’ll need to answer in order to have a complete understanding of your customers’ behaviors. With behavioral targeting, you can create stronger marketing campaigns that are based on your target audience.

Steps for creating a buyer persona

So now that you know what a buyer persona is and why creating buyer personas is important for all businesses, let’s discuss the steps for creating a buyer persona. Your user persona should be based on evidence and facts that you have gathered throughout your market research. Your buyer persona should be based on evidence and facts that you have gathered throughout your research. Your buyer persona should be a comprehensive description of your ideal buyer that doesn’t leave out any important details.

The process of creating your buyer persona might seem overwhelming, but it can be broken down into a few simple steps.

1. Conduct audience research

First and foremost, you need to find your target audience. If you don't have a clear understanding of who your ideal customers are, you can't create your buyer persona, as your customer persona is someone who represents your target audience.

You need to conduct extensive research about your audience so you can thoroughly understand who represents your buyer persona. Look at who your existing customers are, the type of people who follow you on social media, and who your competitors are targeting. You can look at your social media analytics to help you get a better understanding of who your target audience is.

Some of the information about your ideal customers that you'll want to gather through your research includes age, location, language, interests, challenges, hobbies, marital status, and finances.

Finding this information will encompass a wide range of research, like online research and looking at what competitors are doing, as well as conducting interviews with your target audience, such as current customers and referrals. When you talk to people in your target audience, ask them demographic-based questions. You can also do this with surveys, as some people may be hesitant to share personal information about themselves.

It's also a good idea to take some time to research your competitors so you can see who their target audience is, how it differs from yours, and what they're doing differently from you to appeal to their ideal customers. This can help you with identifying a buyer persona that is unique to your brand.

While conducting research throughout this process, make sure you keep detailed records of everything you find in an organized place so you can easily go back and reference them.

2. Pinpoint customer pain points

After conducting thorough research about your target audience, find gaps in the market and what your customers and audience are trying to accomplish. Essentially, you want to pinpoint customer pain points, as well as their goals. What are their motivations and desires and what challenges do they face along the way? When you understand your buyer’s problems, you can figure out a way to solve them.

You need to figure out the answers to these questions so you can have a solid understanding of who your buyer persona is. Talking to your sales team is one way you can identify your customer pain points, but you can also conduct social listening. Social listening is the process of tracking what your customers say about your brand across various platforms.

Social listening is very important for a business because it gives you a better understanding of what your current and future customers think about you. But it’s also a good way to pinpoint your customer pain points. To conduct social listening, monitor your social media channels and look out for mentions of your brand or keywords that are related to your brand. Once you’ve gathered this information, you can then analyze it to have a better idea of how your customers view your business.

3. Organize your buyer personas

Once you've conducted all the necessary research and have a solid understanding of your ideal customer, then you'll need to organize your buyer personas. You can segment your buyer personas into various groups, such as the number of buyer personas you’ll have and the industries they fall under.

During this step, you should look for any similarities that you’ve gathered from your research. This can include similar challenges, goals, motivations, desires, and so forth. It’s likely that you’ll have more than one buyer persona. You don’t have to identify every single one of them right away, as you’ll likely figure out more buyer personas as your business evolves and your marketing strategies change. But once you figure out how many buyer personas you’re dealing with, you can then segment them into different groups.

How you differentiate these groups is ultimately up to you, but it’s helpful to segment them by industry and job title. If your business sells a range of products that appeal to different industries, then segmenting your buyer persona by industry can be a good first step. Your customers likely have different pain points depending on the industry they work in, so you’ll need separate buyer personas for each one.

You can also segment buyer personas by job title. This is a good idea if you follow the same sales process for all the industries you work with. Your buyer persona should align with the specific job title of your target audience so that they’ll have the same goals and challenges.

4. Create your buyer persona

Next comes the exciting part, which is creating your buyer persona. Don’t attempt trying to create all your buyer personas at once. Instead, focus on one at a time. If you’ve conducted all the necessary information about your target audience, then creating your buyer persona should be relatively straightforward.

You’ll want to give your buyer persona a name, an age, a job title, a home, and any other information you think is important to tie to them. Your user persona may be fictional, but it should represent a real person. Once you’ve covered their basic demographic information, you’ll then want to dive deeper into their personal interests and behavioral traits, including their goals, challenges, hobbies, and objections.

You want to create as detailed a description as possible. The more information you can include, the better. Don’t give yourself too many restrictions with this process, and instead, allow yourself to write down as much as you can.

5. Put your buyer persona to use

Once your buyer personas are drafted, it’s time to put them to use by creating marketing materials and implementing sales strategies. If you have a marketing and sales team in your business, make sure they're familiar with these customer personas.

When you understand your buyer persona, you can create content that is curated specifically for them. This way, you know that your ad campaigns are reaching the right people in the right places, which will help to increase your engagement and hopefully boost sales. With this information, you should be able to create effective marketing materials and develop strong sales strategies.

Buyer persona template

If creating buyer personas for your brand seems overwhelming, you can use a customer persona template to help you out. Using an audience persona template is a great way to organize your information so that you can easily keep track of every one of your buyer personas. With a customer persona template, you’re provided with the outline so all you have to do is fill in the categories with the information you’ve gathered from your research.

A buyer persona template may include the following categories for you to fill in:

  • Background information: Provide personal information, such as your buyer's name, age, occupation, location, and marital status.
  • Biography: This can be a couple of sentences that include basic information about your buyer, like their education and interests.
  • Personal interests: In this section, you can include more specifics about your buyer’s personal interests, such as their hobbies.
  • Goals: List several of your buyer’s goals, including both personal and professional goals.
  • Behavioral traits: Provide a few of your buyer’s behavioral traits, like what social media they use and how they get their information.
  • Challenges: List several of your buyer’s pain points, such as what’s keeping them from accomplishing their goals.
  • Objections: Provide a few examples of things your buyer does not like in their personal and professional life.

Buyer persona examples

Here are is an example of a buyer persona so that you can get a better idea of how to create yours:

Name: Jane Smith Age: 30 Occupation: Nurse Location: Los Angeles, California Marital status: Married with two children

Biography: Jane Smith is a part-time nurse and full-time mom of two. She was born and raised in sunny Los Angeles, California but loves to travel both domestically and internationally whenever she gets a chance. She’s passionate about healthcare and works part-time as a nurse at a local hospital. Because Jane often works long hours, she appreciates her quiet time when she gets a chance– which isn’t often with two kids. Jane is looking for high-quality noise cancellation headphones that she can wear when at home and when traveling.

Personal Interests:

  • Reading
  • Music
  • Travel
  • Working out
  • Cooking

Goals:

  • Raise her children and eventually become a travel nurse
  • Travel the world with her husband
  • Increase her annual income
  • Get more sleep and relax more

Behavioral traits:

  • Strong online presence
  • Very active on Instagram and Pinterest
  • Frequently online shops
  • Reads a lot of blogs

Challenges:

  • Doesn’t get enough alone time
  • Has a hard time sleeping
  • Wants to work more but doesn’t have the time
  • Struggles with balancing all her responsibilities

Objections:

  • Not having enough time to spend with kids
  • Not getting enough sleep
  • Working late hours

Wrapping up: Using buyer persona templates

Creating buyer personas is imperative to the success of a business. If you don't know your customer personas, you can't create effective marketing strategies that will boost sales and drive revenue for your business.

But fortunately, if you're struggling with creating buyer personas, you can use a buyer persona template to help you out.

Mailchimp offers a free buyer persona template that includes the specific categories you need to fill out with information about your buyer. A good buyer persona template will include sections for your buyer's goals, challenges, personal interests, and behavioral traits, so you can have a solid understanding of who your ideal buyer is.

Mailchimp is an all-in-one marketing platform that offers important resources for business owners. In addition to a buyer persona template, you can get access to a myriad of other helpful tools with Mailchimp.

Mailchimp has resources that can help you learn how to sell anything to an audience and how to convert website visitors into customers, so you can increase your customer base and ultimately drive revenue for your business. Mailchimp is here to help you make your business the best it can possibly be.

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