Buyer personas: A guide to reaching your target customers

If you want to get the best return on your investment, time and money, you can't rely on luck.

Instead, you need to know exactly who your target customers or audience are. In marketing, we call this your buyer persona.

What are buyer personas?

A buyer persona is a character you create that closely represents your users or customers. It includes their needs, motivations, concerns and goals – in fact, anything that influences how they think about your business and/or your product.

Your buyer personas convey who your buyers are, what they're trying to accomplish, what goals drive their behaviour, how they think, how they buy, and why they are making buying decisions.

You can have more than one user or customer persona for your business.

How do I define and create buyer personas?

The most accurate buyer personas are based on market research as well as on insights you gather from your actual customer base through surveys, interviews, etc. That includes a mix of customers, prospects, and those people outside of your contact database who might align with your target audience.

What information do I need?

• Interview customers either in person or over the phone to discover what they like about your product or service.

• Look through your contacts database to uncover trends about how certain leads or customers find and consume your content.

• When creating forms to use on your website, use form fields that capture important persona information.

• Consider feedback from your customer service and sales teams (if you have them) on the customers they are interacting with the most.

When you come to define your buyer persona, the first thing to do is to gather demographic information. This can include information on the customer's:

• income

• occupation

• interests

• gender

• level of education

• location

Demographic information doesn't tell you everything about your buyer persona, but it's a good starting point.

Next, you need to find out what problems and challenges your ideal customer is experiencing, and what results they would like to achieve. It's very useful to find out an ideal customer's values in order to make a deeper connection.

How do I use buyer personas?

Buyer personas allow you to personalise or target your marketing for different segments of your audience.

For example, instead of sending the same lead nurturing emails to everyone in your database, segment by buyer persona and tailor your messaging according to what you know about those different personas.

What are the benefits of developing a buyer persona?

Defining and creating buyer personas helps you to achieve much more cost-effective marketing, reduces marketing waste, and increases your return on investment (ROI). Here's why:

• With targeted marketing, you can convey very clear and strong messages to the key audience that's ready and waiting to hear it and, more importantly, act on it.

• When you have clearly defined buyer personas, you can convey messages to them in the language they understand and provide solutions that appear to be tailored to meeting their needs.

• Defining buyer personas becomes very useful when buying paid advertising on social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook. These platforms allow you to create highly targeted advertising for a very specific audience. As a result, the more you know about who you want to target and where with what messages, the more effective your advertising campaign is going to be.

Relevant resources

• Why creating buyer personas is so important to a new business

• Target customers: How to identify your small business's target audience

• Lunch and Learn: How small businesses can create buyer personas