You’ve probably come across the term buyer persona or customer avatar or audience persona but essentially they all mean the same thing and they are the details of who your perfect client is.
What is a Buyer Persona?
In short, it’s a semi-fictional character that represents who your perfect audience is. The details of who your perfect audience is are very important because it allows you to understand who they are. It goes beyond just those basic categories and basic demographics and taps into the person that taps into their circumstances and their individual lives and this amount of detail allows you to connect with them on a much more human level. It allows a brand to tailor their offer or their messaging to who this person is so they can better connect with them. Your buyer persona acts as a tool to attract high-quality leads and people who are essentially more likely to buy what you have to offer. If you’re going to take the time to market your business and your brand the way you should then you want to be as efficient as possible with your marketing efforts and having clarity in who your audience is through a buyer persona will help you do that.
Why is Buyer Personal so Important?
In short, it’s all about understanding. Most businesses don’t take the time to develop out who their audience is and develop buyer personas so they can speak to them on a more relevant level. Most businesses you’ll find will define who their audience is in terms of categories so they might define their audience as female professionals between 22 and 34 but that information doesn’t allow you to connect with who that person is because that person doesn’t identify as a female professional between 22 and 34. Understanding who your audience is and defining a buyer persona allows you to tap into the detail of that person’s lives so you can better understand who they are, what they’re trying to achieve, what challenges they’re going through, and what emotions are connected to those challenges and all of this information allows you to better resonate with who they are and better connect with them on a human level.
How Many Buyer Personas Should I Have?
This depends on the individual businesses. You might be very clear on who the audience is and you might to just have one buyer persona or you might have different segments and different groups and you might have up to five different buyer personas. Of course, you can communicate with each one of these personas individually through your marketing messages but your brand and your brand messaging as a whole should appeal to them all.
What are the Different Types of Buyer Personas?
The answer to that question is that there are no real types of buyer personas. Every single buyer persona is different because people are different. There’s no cookie-cutter solution where you take this type of buyer persona for this type of business. You have to custom create buyer personas every single time but luckily for you, I have a system that you can use to create a buyer persona
Start with a Category and a Name
That female professional between 22 and 34 is not enough for a buyer persona but it is a great starting point for your buyer persona because it allows us to categorize a certain group of individuals as to who the broad audience is. You want to start to shape that or you want to personally identify who this type of persona is, you might give this persona a name and you might get a little bit more clarity around what they do so instead of being a female professional 22 to 34 it might be Debbie the Marketing Manager so getting a bit clarity there sets the tone for getting personal with who this buyer persona is.
Understand their Demographic
The demographics are the circumstances around their lives and it gives us a window into the type of person that they are. It gives us a window into their lives so the demographics that you would be looking for here would be their age, their sex, their profession, their marital status, their income, all of this general information starts to paint a picture of the types of lives that these people have. Of course, this is not enough to connect and resonate with who they are but it is a great stepping stone to understand what their lives are like.
Define their Psychographics
While their demographics are all about the circumstances of their lives their psychographics start to get a little bit more detailed in who this person is because it’s about their behaviors and what makes them unique. Here we’re looking at their preferences. What is it that they prefer, what kind of news sources do they read, what do they do on the weekend, what type of food do they like to eat or what restaurants do they like to go to, what sports do they follow or play, do they have an active lifestyle, do they have a more passive lifestyle, all of this information will start to give you a window into the type of person they are and the types of behaviors they have so you can start to identify the type of character and the type of personality that they are.
Discover their Goals
Their audience is typically going to have two types of goals and that is their big picture goal and their immediate goal. Their immediate goal is something that they’re trying to achieve right now and typically your brand is going to be able to help them achieve that goal. Their big picture goal will be more their aspirational goals that their immediate goal will contribute to achieving so if they achieve this immediate goal it will work towards achieving their big picture goal. A perfect example of this would be a business owner who’s trying to meet his sales target this month to stay on track for his target and his big picture goal is that ultimately he wants to sell his business so if he’s able to achieve his immediate goal that will contribute towards his big picture goal.
Uncover their Challenges
Just like their goals they’re going to have two types of challenges here, they’re going to have challenges around their big picture goals and they are going to have challenges around their immediate goals. These challenges again are something that your brand is going to be able to help out with. Their big picture challenges on the other hand possibly you might not be able to help out with those at all but you should still understand what challenges are standing in their way. When it comes to their immediate challenges there might be one or two challenges that you might be able to help them out directly but there might be more challenges than that that they’re facing and if you understand those challenges you can speak to them about those challenges and show empathy and understanding and maybe even guide them on their way. Again coming back to that example of the business owner may be the business owner want to generate more sales this month that is the challenge this he has but some smaller challenges around that are he wants to generate more leads and more traffic to his website so that’s a perfect example of how understanding your audience’s challenges and the challenges around the ones that you can help resolve can help you better connect with who they are and what they’re going through.
Extract their Emotions
With all these goals and challenges there are going to be a lot of emotions around there so representing the goals will be the desires, what is it that they want to achieve, what is that desire that they have to achieve that goal, and around the challenges what are their fears, what is standing in their way and what does that make them feel if they can’t overcome those challenges. These fears and desires are the emotions that your brand will be able to use to connect with what they’re going through, to connect with those emotions, to connect with that triune brain and that reptilian brain where they make their decisions. We don’t make decisions through that logical brain, we make decisions through our emotions so if your brand and your messaging can connect with those emotions that they’re going through whether it’s those fears or whether it’s those desires you will resonate with who they are and what they are feeling.
Make no bones about it, your brand persona is one of the most critical tasks in building your brand and building your business because without that buyer persona you don’t know who you’re speaking to, you don’t know what challenges they’re going through, you don’t know what they are feeling, and you don’t know what they want and if you don’t have that information how are you going to build a brand that is going to connect and resonate with who that person is. The answer is you can’t. If you don’t have to message that speaks directly to who your audience is then your messaging is speaking to nobody in particular and that is the fastest way for your brand to go nowhere in particular. Once you have that buyer persona and you know who the person is and you know what they want you can work on giving them what they want.
