What Is a Buyer Persona and How to Create One?

Businesses need to create buyer personas, and it's particularly relevant for new entrepreneurs. Here's how you can.

The primary aim of any business is to drive more sales and revenue. But without knowing who exactly you'll sell to, it's going to be a tough road.

If you're a brand new entrepreneur and just stepping into marketing, you must know everything about one marketing detail—buyer persona.

If you don't know what that is, don't worry. In this article, we'll discuss everything about it, including the five essential steps to create detailed buyer personas.

Let's dive right in.

What Is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is basically a detailed representation of your ideal client or customer. It can give you all the answers about them, including their age, gender, and everything else like:

• Where do they hang out?
• What language do they speak in?
• What do they like?
• What do they dislike?
• What motivates them to make a decision?
• What keeps them awake at night?
• What are their problems, aka their pain points, and so on.

With all such answers, you can create and launch better marketing campaigns and talk to your audience using the terms they understand well.

Finally, if everything goes well, you can double your response and conversion rate.

How Buyer Personas Can Help You

Being an entrepreneur or solopreneur, you might think, why should you bother investing your time researching your audience and creating a buyer persona.

After all, you're just starting out. You're not even that big at the moment, right? Even if your company only has a single website and you are its sole employee, knowing your buyer persona is crucial.

Why? Well, the answer is simple. If you don't know what you're going after, you'll never know whether you've reached the right person or spent too much time attracting the wrong type of audience.

Hence, it's necessary to define your buyer persona. It doesn't have to be a long document. You can create a single pager and hang it on your pinboard. This way, whenever you need it, it'll be right in front of you.

So, let's understand how to create it for your business.

5 Steps to Creating a Buyer Persona

Now that you know what buyer persona is and why you need to create one, you can follow this complete step-by-step process to make it.

The steps would include asking a lot of questions. And you might wonder about finding the right people to survey. Well, go for your current clients, potential clients, targeted clients choosing competition over you, referrals, your third-party network, etc.

Likewise, you can include people who need the services you are offering but aren't choosing to purchase them from you or your competitors.

These people should get you enough answers to create your detailed buyer persona. And with time, you can keep on improving this document to target just the right people.

Step 1: Get Their Demographic Details

After you've attracted the attention of the right people, here is a list of questions you should ask in order to get their demographic information:

• What is their age, marital status, income or financial status, and gender?
• Where do they live?
• Do they have children? If yes, how many?
• What is their current job level?
• What industry are they in?
• What is their education level?

You can gather more questions from different resources or create your own, depending on your industry.

Step 2: Get Their Psychographic Details

The second thing you need to know is how your ideal clients deal with industry-related things psychologically. Here's a list of questions that you can ask them to find this out:

• What frustrates them the most?
• What was their worst experience with customer service/contractor like?
• What was their best experience with customer service/contractor like?
• What motivates them?
• What inspires them?
• What are the top three things they want to accomplish in life?
• Do they love their job?
• What is their best accomplishment so far?
• What gives them the most stress?
• What challenges do they face in their industry?

Again, you can include other questions or modify these as per your needs.

Step 3: Get Their Behavioral Details

This is again essential to create a persona profile. Here's a list of questions that you can ask them:

• Where do you learn about "industry-specific topics?"
• Where do they get their offline resources from?
• Where do they get their online resources from?
• How do they usually interact with contractors? Or What ways do they prefer vendors to contact them through?
• Where do they get their "industry-specific products' or services'" recommendations?
• How much do they easily spend on shopping?
• What type of luxurious purchases have they made so far?
• How much can they spend to get rid of a certain "industry-specific problem?"

Step 4: Get a Little More Industry-Specific Information

Once you've asked, the people you chose for this survey, these questions, your job is still not done. Now, you need the answers to a few more questions, like:

• What challenges does your product/services solve?
• What challenges does your audience are currently facing?
• How much value does your industry hold?
• How do people usually buy from the businesses in your industry?
• What common problems do all of your customers/clients face in your product or services?

Once you get the answers to all of the questions mentioned above–you can include some of your own, too–put this information together to see things more clearly.

Step 5: Compile the Data and Fill the Basic Details of Your Buyer Persona

You have two different sources of data to create your buyer persona.

One of them is your website visitors. You can find out more about it from different resources like Google Analytics, if you do your website development or technical work yourself.

Another source would be the group of people you just interviewed or surveyed—the data you've collected so far. Your job is to find out the common traits of these people.

For instance, you can check which post is getting most of the traffic and why. This way, you can determine the common problem they're trying to solve. Plus, you can list the people who gave similar answers in the survey and note them down.

Then add these key components of a buyer persona to create a semi-fictional representation of the people you need to go after. It should display their name, age, image, gender, likes, dislikes, location, and so on.

Here's an example of a buyer persona from Hubspot. You can create one in a similar manner.

This way, you or your sales team, if you have one, will know whether you're talking to your ideal client and what you can say to engage them or convert them into paying customers.

Become Adept at Targeted Marketing

Now that you know how to identify your ideal client each time you interact with a potential client, it's time you take some action.

Use the resources provided and start creating your buyer persona today. After all, your time is way too important to spend on the wrong people, who later on either won't convert or turn out to be bad clients.

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