How to Create Buyer Personas to Set Up the Foundation for Marketing Campaigns
In order to have a successful business, one of the key aspects is the ability to understand your target market. Your target audience entails all of the different types of people who could benefit from your product or service.
Defining your target market begins with creating one or more buyer personas. Effectively, a buyer persona is the ideal customer — the person who needs the most what you’re offering.
The whole process of identifying a customer persona is time-consuming and needs effort from the whole team, but it will grant the company a huge advantage when setting up marketing campaigns.
Start with the Basics
Starting from the most basic information, you should break down the basic demographics of your target audience. Think about the following:
- Age — What is your customer’s age demographic? Closer to their 20s, in the 30–40 range or in their 60s?
- Gender — Does your product cater to men, women, or both?
- Average income — What is the income bracket of your customer persona? This will impact how and where you market your product.
- Location — Is your product available in certain locations? Or is it available worldwide?
Personal Values
The next step in building your customer persona is identifying what their personal values are. Look for aspects that they might find important in their lives and how they go about when purchasing products or services.
For example, if you’re selling a product for kids, you can assume that your target audience is their parents. Most likely they will want the best products for their kids and will look for quality at the expense of paying a higher price.
Once you get a good grasp of your audience’s personal values, you’ll gain valuable insight into their pain points.
Identify Pain Points
Every potential customer is looking for a product that helps fulfill one of their needs. When you’re defining your buyer persona, consider the pain points they might have and how your product or service contributes as a solution.
Individual needs or pain points will depend on your niche, but every industry has its own set of problems that business owners try to solve.
Dive deeper into how your product is helping customers. If you’re not sure what challenges your prospects are facing, conduct a customer survey on your website and ask them directly. Many businesses use existing issues their customers face to create new personas and develop new products.
