Create The Right Buyer Persona For Your Business [Free Template]

In this day and age knowing your buyer persona is key for the success of your business. Let’s start with a brief explanation of what a buyer persona is. In short, this is a description of your ideal target customer. In most cases, the buyer persona is based on a lot of data and research into your existing audience, perfect prospects and customers. 

This is why in today’s post, we will go through the meaning, reasons of importance and ways to help you create the perfect buyer persona for your business. We have also prepared a free template to help you get started on developing the right persona for your business. 

Why is creating buyer personas so important?

Buyer personas assist you in better understanding your current consumers as well as your potential customers. This makes it simpler for you to adjust your content, marketing, product development, and overall services to your target audience’s individual wants, habits, and worries. For example, you have a bakery and you want to create a new niche product, suitable for people with special dietary requirements. A buyer persona will help you understand the specific needs and interests of this new audience you want to attract. Furthermore, to help you get a better understanding of the overall target consumer, you may conduct some market research in the form of surveys or interviews. Based on this, you can build your persona – i.e. people who are lactose intolerant, others who have problems with gluten or sugar intake and so on. 

How many personas should you have?

Depending on your business, ideas and products, you could have as little as one or two personas, or as many as 20. In the case of the bakery alone, we identified three main audiences to focus on. The best advice here is to have as many buyer personas as needed to make sure every aspect of your business is covered. 

So, how do you go about creating your buyer persona? 

As a start, to simplify the overall process, you can download our FREE TEMPLATES which you can find at the end of the article. 

As we already mentioned a few times, conducting thorough research when starting to think about your personas is key. You could run surveys, interviews and focus groups (if needed) among your current customers and potential clients. You could also include those who aren’t in your contacts database but fit your target demographic.

Here are a few suggestions for acquiring the data you’ll need to create personas:

• Examine your contacts database for patterns in how specific leads or customers discover and consume your material.
• When designing forms for your website, provide form fields that capture your persona’s vital information. For example, if you want to determine whether your lead is coming from a smaller company or a huge enterprise, make sure to include this in your lead form. 
• Take into account what your sales staff has to say about the leads they’re connecting with the most. From there you can work on some generalizations about the various clients you best serve.
• Run a quick survey or short interview with your existing customers and prospects. This way you will learn exactly what they enjoy about your product or service. You will also be able to find out what more they would like to see from your brand. This will help you identify your buyer personas’ needs more specifically. 

There are several ways to conduct surveys and interviews. Depending on the size of your business, customer data and survey needs you could use e-mails or phone calls. Another option would be referrals – through your network or third-party networks. A great example of such third-party networks is UserTesting. 

Pro tip: People usually respond better to such interviews and surveys if they receive something in return. Therefore, it will be beneficial to include a prize or incentive when conducting your research. 

What else is needed to build the right buyer persona for your business? 

To also be able to visualise the desired target persona, you need to include some demographics. In our FREE TEMPLATES you can easily fill in the information you gathered from the initial research and also include demographics such as age and job title.  

Once you are fully ready with creating your buyer personas, you will be able to gain a better understanding of your target consumers. One more step you need to take is to ensure that everyone on your team knows how to best target, support, and develop those further. This will help you expand your audience, even more, increase conversions, and build loyalty.

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