A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal best-fit customer. Personas are a mix of real data and some educated guesses based on research.
Most good personas consist of demographic and psychographic information.
The Demographic information of a persona comes from the most common background information resulting from the study of an audience's specific background characteristics.
Here are some examples of information gathered during demographic studies: age, sex, income level, ethnicity, employment, location, homeownership, and education level.
A buyer persona's psychographic information, such as their values, beliefs, interests, attitude, lifestyle, and personality, comes from surveys, focus groups, or interviewing customer-facing teams.
Another name for a buyer persona is a customer avatar. When you hear someone refer to an avatar in the context of marketing or read it in a blog, they are merely using another common name for a persona.
Personas help you understand your customers better. When you know your customers, you can get to their motivations; you can more easily speak to their needs and give them what they need to make a purchase or move to the next step in the buyer's journey.
When you thoroughly research your company's personas, you can find overlaps in what your customers' minimum needs are in a solution and what they want in a product.
Looking through your customer reviews and your competitors' reviews is a great way to help your customers better. Customer reviews are an indirect way to find out when customers like and dislike something about your products and services. When done well, you can add insights from your research to specific buyer personas.
Understanding what information your customers need to make a buying decision is vital. Through persona research, you can document customers' process for purchasing a product or service like yours.
Personas allow us to understand where customers are spending their time. Knowing this helps us target and connect with them where they are as a group.
By knowing who influences your customers, you can build relationships with those influencers or even develop similar content.
Understanding your personas allows you to learn your customers' most common objections. You can address these questions in advance to remove any friction or hesitance your customers may have when considering a purchase.
Personas allow us to segment our customers into lists. We can write content more specific to each list becuase everyone in the list has similar needs, wants, influencers, social habits, questions, and concerns.
Suppose you've never created a persona for your business, and you would like to. In that case, we suggest you start by going through your existing customers and grouping them by their demographic information first.
Once you completed the first step, you should look for other ways to group them until it's like you're describing a single person.
Keep in mind that buyer personas should never be finite. Your customers may change, or you may learn something new about them. Treat your personas as living documents that you work to continuously improve and keep up to date.