5 Minutes To: Creating Buyer Personas

Buyer Personas are an incredibly useful tool to use with your business’s marketing playbook. Not only do they provide a handy reference for both you and any external marketing partners, but they can also offer you a framework for creating any content. 

What Are Buyer Personas?

Buyer Personas are (fictional) snapshots of your audience base. They represent different types of customers that you frequently work with. It’s important to remember that these aren’t prescriptive of everyone who buys your product or service - just the most frequent or important ones. It’s a well-known marketing adage that you can’t be everything to everyone all of the time. By targeting your buyer personas you can focus on being something specific to the people who are interested in you and your brand. 

These personas are simplified, generalised cheat sheets that tell you everything you need to know about each audience segment. From the social media channels they like to hang out on, to the problems they’re facing that you can solve; you’re building up a reference point for understanding your customers and how you can engage with them effectively.

How Can I Create a Buyer Persona?

The first stage of writing Buyer Personas takes research, you’ll need to spend a lot of time understanding who your key customer groups are and their behaviours. First, identify who your core customers are. Ask yourself: which demographics continue to visit your site, who continues to purchase, and who do you want to be attracting - Buyer Personas are half based on data and half aspirational. 

It’s important to note that these personas are generalisations. You might name them after a particularly notable client or customer, but aside from that, you’ll need to remember that not everyone who fits into a demographic will behave in the same way. 

Once you’ve identified the audience groups your personas will cover, you're back to the research drawing board to pull together the main themes that unite and define these groups. We like to use some of the following identifiers when we’re putting them together, but also consider anything else that might be useful for you to have at a glance:

• Background: What’s their relationship to your brand? What projects are they working on? What’s their demographic breakdown?

• Goals: What are they trying to achieve? 

• Budget: What does this group tend to spend on your products? 

• Identifiers: What differentiates them from similar demographics, or makes them distinct from your average site visitor?

• Challenges: What challenges are they facing that you can solve?

• Where to Find Them Online: Which online channels do they prefer?

This will build you up a picture of your consumers and specific audience that you can use time and time again.

How Do I Use Buyer Personas?

There are plenty of uses for buyer personas, as they can form the bedrock of your marketing strategy. Having this in-depth understanding of your audience will help you to make informed decisions about how you spend your budget, what kind of campaigns you run and the messaging that needs to come to the forefront. If these are something you need to develop, make sure to have them prepared by the time we get into the new year’s planning season to help guide your strategic thinking.

On top of this, you can also use them for benchmarking. How did this group perform compared to last year? Can you see a reason for the significant difference if there is one? Has there been any impact from specific activity, and can this be replicated? Understanding performance metrics within the context of these demographics will help you to strengthen your activity. 

Lastly, as buyer personas are a great reference point, they serve as a useful resource for any external partnerships you bring in. This allows you to ensure that you’re singing from the same hymn sheet, and that everyone at the table has the same level of in-depth knowledge about your brand. 

Buyer personas are an integral part of your marketing strategy, so make sure that yours are clear, actionable, and up-to-date. If you need help with your marketing strategies give Beacon an email at hello@beaconagency.co.uk.