What is a buyer persona?

When it comes to achieving your business goals, anticipating customers’ specific needs and desires is key. But how do we achieve this? By creating buyer personas, a detailed semi-fictional profile of our ideal target customers. Buyer personas are incredibly useful marketing tools that can help you tailor your messaging and customize your offerings to fulfill your target audience's specific needs.

Ideally, we know our customers as well as our family members and close friends, and we treat them as such. In today’s world, people absolutely expect companies to deliver information, services, and experiences that are catered specifically to them. 

Personas are the lifeblood of any business, so if you’re not using them (correctly or otherwise), it’s time to learn how to do so. In this guide, you'll learn what actually a buyer persona is, and we will take you through the main steps to creating your own buyer personas in 6 simple steps.

Buyer personas: everything you need to know

1. What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is a fictional character that represents your target customer. Using a buyer persona helps you to create a much deeper understanding of customer behavior so that you can narrow down and focus on qualified leads as opposed to wasting time with a generalized audience. However, a buyer persona is generally a much broader composite of your target customer than a user persona, because it typically includes a wide swath of users across your customer's organization (marketing, IT specialists, etc.).

2. The origin of buyer personas

American software designer and engineer Alan Cooper created the concept of using personas in the early ’80s. He would continue to refine the concept throughout the next decade. Cooper formally introduced the idea to the public in 1998, with his book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity—but it was in 1983, during several fateful walks around the golf course near his home in Monterey, California, that the concept of personas began to take shape. 

At the time, Cooper was designing a critical-path project management program (dubbed Plan*It), and the idea of interfacing with software was new or non-existent in our culture. In a bit of a eureka moment, Cooper realized that he needed to use role-playing techniques (as in, something Method actor Daniel Day-Lewis might do for his next film) to embody the people who would be using his software. This would allow him to put these users first — to truly decipher what their needs were and see what was necessary or unnecessary about his creation. 

Cooper would go on to interview a range of people — the intended audience for Plan*It — to ensure that he was asking (and answering) the right questions, evaluating the entire design process from the perspective of his audience. Hence, the concept of personas was born.

3. Why are buyer personas important for your business?

Buyer personas can help you for several reasons:

• Understand customers and prospective customers on a deep level

• Creating buyer personas can help to unify and strengthen the entire company and make sure that everyone is targeting the same specific niche

• Make sure that all marketing activities are geared towards your target audience

• Be able to tailor product development according to your target consumer

• Target social ads/campaigns more effectively

• Craft targeted content

• Create brand loyalty and enduring trust

For example, let's say that you're creating a new food delivery app. Your buyer persona will need to include plenty of details about what informs a specific type of person's buying decisions. It might look something like this: Helen is a millennial woman in her mid-30s who wants to eat healthier, more vegetarian-based meals, but doesn't have a ton of extra time to cook. She frequently searches for easy, fast recipes on Instagram and also uses influencer recommendations via YouTube. 

By outlining "Helen's" shopping habits, including where and how she does her research for recipes, the company can then formulate a marketing plan that incorporates this information — thereby enticing a bigger audience to buy the product.

4. Buyer persona vs. user persona

User personas and buyer personas are similar in that they are tools that help product developers, marketing strategists, and other members of a company envision and understand their audience.

However, there are two primary differences between the two: A user persona is a tool to help companies better empathize with their target customer, but a buyer persona is a tool to help companies better understand the motivations of the people who will actually be buying the product. Buyer personas tend to be broader and more complicated since they necessarily have to include a team of decision-makers across the board (managers, supervisors, etc.), as these are the people who often decide whether to purchase a product or not. 

Here's another way to think about it: One of the main differences between buyer and user personas is that the buyer persona might not necessarily be using your product(s), but a user persona will. For example, a parent is considering buying a new bike for their child. But who will be using the bike — the parent or the child? Obviously, the child is the user; therefore, for our purposes, we can think of the child as the user persona and the parent as the buyer persona.

Creating both types of personas is important in developing your marketing strategy and products since both the child and the parent obviously have different goals and priorities.

5. How to create buyer personas

Here are the 6 simple steps you must follow to create a detailed buyer persona:

1. Start by answering some key generic questions

• What is the age/gender/economic background of your potential targeted user?

• What are the user’s goals and interests?

• Where is the user getting information about products and services that are similar to yours? 

• How much time does the user spend online, and through what tech device are they accessing the internet? 

• What social apps does the user use?

• What are the needs of your user? their challenges? desires? motivations? 

2. Explore your current customer base to find people who’ve engaged with your product. (But, don’t just talk to people who wholeheartedly love your product; customers who are unhappy for a common reason will also help you understand and flesh out your personas)

3. Conduct one-on-one interviews with an adequate number of people (using your contacts database)

4. Group people together based on similarities in their responses

5. Organize the information you’ve gathered into a buyer persona template, and include the following:

• A fictional name and a photo

• Basic demographic information: age, gender, economic background, communication preferences (anything you’d learn on a dating profile, basically) 

• Interests

• Behavioral traits 

• Primary and secondary goals and challenges 

• Buying patterns

• Real “quotes” from your persona, based on the info you’ve gathered

• Common objections, i.e. reasons they might not buy your product

• Pain/frustration points

6. Repeat the process. (It’s important to create more than one persona; after all, different people may buy your product for different reasons)

Conclusion

At the most integral level, creating and consistently developing buyer personas, essentially, putting ourselves in the user’s shoes, allows us to create messaging that appeals to the target audience, and create products and experiences for our customers that cater to their specific needs and desires.  

Rather than making the common mistake to look outward as a business, it's important to look inward — by focusing on what our potential customer pain points are, needs and desires and tailoring our products, communications, and strategies accordingly.

The bottom line? Humanizing our audience by creating and developing buyer personas will lead to a brighter, better future for the entire company.