The buyer persona for your business is basically a detailed, semi-fictional description of your ideal client. Once established, this persona should be used to guide your business and marketing activities. Taking the time to develop your buyer persona can help you expand your market reach, encourage brand loyalty, attract and retain customers, and increase sales. A buyer persona is also known as a customer persona, user persona, customer profile, ideal customer, audience persona or customer avatar (to name a few!).
Why is having a buyer persona important?
Having a buyer persona:
- Drives a deeper understanding of your ideal customer – Knowing as much information as you can about your prospective customer’s personality, likes, buying habits, etc., can give you tips on how to better connect with them. It’s an essential component of your marketing strategy and helps you gear your copy and content to connect your product benefits directly with their needs.
- Helps you save on marketing efforts and spend – By being able to home in on your target market, you can design and implement targeted marketing campaigns that will result in more sales with less effort — and less dollars.
- Makes you stand out from the competition – When it’s obvious you have a good understanding of your ideal customer, and you are putting their needs first, people notice. This establishes you as a trustworthy brand. You give your target audience a reason to spend their money with you versus your competition.
How do you define your buyer persona?
There are 5 areas that define your buyer persona:
- Demographics: This includes things like your ideal customer’s age, education, gender, income, location, and job title. All of this information plays a part in things like how much your ideal customer is willing to pay for your product and what types of content resonate with them best.
- Personality/Interests: How open to new ideas is your ideal customer? What about their degree of self-discipline, or emotional stability? Pinpointing their personality traits and interests can help identify the keywords they may search for, or how likely and willing they are to express themselves on social media. This also helps build your knowledge of the words to use in your copy that they are likely to respond well to.
- Awareness: Understanding your ideal customer’s awareness of your product and industry can help you figure out how to communicate with them. Do they currently use a competitor’s product?? How informed are they about your product or service? This information gives you the specifics on how you should feature your benefits.
- Psyche: What makes them tick? Do graphs, statistics and case studies influence their decision? Or maybe they are more concerned with customer testimonials and simplified features? What are their values? How about their fears? What are their pain points? Why would they NOT buy your product? Knowing the answers to these questions can help you position your product as a reliable solution for their worries and problems.
- Buying behavior: What factors do your ideal customers take into account when they make their decision to buy? Is it price, features, ease of use, customer service? Where do they normally buy? Online? Brick and mortar? Knowing this can help you pin down the “what” and “where” to go to market.
Expert tip.
Tap into these free trial or free market research tools to find relevant keywords and run a competitor analysis:
- Find relevant keyword phrases to include in your website content and meta data to improve your SERP and better target your ideal customer. Use Google’s Keyword Planner tool or the SEMRush Keyword Magic tool.
- Find your top 5 competitors by entering your website URL (or if you don’t yet have a website, use a competitor’s website URL) in a competitor analysis tool like the SEO PowerSuite Domain Competitor tool. Your top 5 competitors should have above average monthly traffic (monthly visitors), offer a comparable product/service and have a similar brand style.
- Then, do market research on your competitor’s website analytics to find out who their buyer persona is. Pull audience insights data using the SEMrush Market Research and Traffic Analytics or SimilarWeb’s Website Analysis tools feature to build your buyer personas.
What is a user persona?
There is also such a thing as a user persona as well. A buyer persona isn’t necessarily a user, but they can be.
A perfect example of this would be a personal computer. You could buy one for your own use. In that case, you are both the buyer and user persona. You could be buying the computer for your mom or an employee. In that case, you are still the buyer, but not the user.
All of this simply means that when you are creating marketing plans and using personae, you need to keep in mind both the buyer and the user.
When you have identified everything you need to know about your ideal customer, you need to make sure all of their information aligns with all of your marketing plans and efforts, including your brand guidelines.
How do I apply a buyer persona when creating brand guidelines?
Now that you have created your buyer personas, you can use it to create your brand guidelines.
Why? In order to sell your product, you need to make sure that your brand is in alignment with your ideal customer. Things like your brand values, brand personality, the colors, fonts, and words that you use in your brand need to resonate with them.
How? Take what you have learned about them and use it to your advantage. Using the right words, saying them in the right way, in the right fonts and colors will attract your target audience, converting their interest in your brand into sales.
You have an ideal client, or you wouldn’t have a business. Use your buyer persona to target and retain your ideal customers and increase your sales.
Need help identifying your buyer persona? Download my FREE buyer persona worksheet.
And, don’t forget your brand guidelines. Get our free Brand Guidelines worksheet here!
