Making your company’s first buyer persona

It’s your monthly business strategy meeting and your numbers aren’t where they should be. You can’t really put your finger on why either. Last month was great, you made a lot of sales and your paid ads brought in loads of leads for your business.

This month it’s tumbleweeds. Why?  

Your issue could be a lack of audience targeting, or maybe the tone and positioning of your brand isn’t connecting with your customers. It could be a combination of both and when you don’t have a solid buyer persona to base your marketing strategies around creating campaigns that consistently perform is really difficult.

You don’t know who you should be targeting, what messaging they’ll respond to and how best to convert them from leads into customers. Without a marketing persona you’re essentially throwing your marketing budget into a bottomless pit and hoping some sales, or at least qualified leads, come back out.      

A detailed and thorough marketing persona should be one of the first things your business makes. No matter the size of your company, having a clear picture of who your customer is can help you with everything from pricing to packaging. 

A buyer persona can also inform your marketing strategy and it gives you a specific person to target. This means you won’t be casting your digital marketing net wide in hopes of catching some leads (a tenuous fishing analogy we know). You can focus on marketing to a demographic of people you know are interested in your product. 

Once you have this demographic locked down your job is to then review and optimise your targeting and messaging to get the maximum return on your marketing efforts. Creating a useful and accurate buyer persona is the essential first step to doing this and we’ll explain how to make one in this article.     

What are the benefits of making a buyer persona 

So, what are the benefits to making a buyer persona? Well, besides the ones we’ve mentioned in the section above there are loads. A buyer persona is an essential document for your marketing team and business if you want to stand any chance of communicating with your customers’ in a way they’ll appreciate.

But besides that, creating your first buyer persona can also teach your marketing team and business a lot about who your customer actually is. 9 times out of 10 (and this is especially true for smaller businesses) the person you think your product or service is designed for is wrong. Or at least your ideal customer is a bit different from the person you thought they were. 

Taking the time to speak to your current customers and gather data about their spending habits, where they live and who they are can help you uncover insights about them that could radically change how you position your product on the market.

For example, you might run a business called Kold Weather Wear that sells high end winter jackets. Your product’s primary goal is to keep people warm in alpine conditions and you think your customer is a male aged between 20-50 who likes the outdoors, hiking and environmentalism. Essentially Bear Grylls.  

When you start making your buyer persona you uncover a lot of your customers are actually young people between 16-25 who wear your clothes as a fashion statement. They like festivals, clubbing and environmentalism. They’re roadmen.  

If you hadn’t bothered to create a buyer persona of your customer you never would have uncovered this. This example shows how creating a buyer persona can help you learn new things about your customers but it also raises another question…

Can your business have more than one buyer persona? 

The very short answer to this question is YES, absolutely. In fact most businesses will have multiple personas which are normally aligned to the products or services they produce. 

Large multinational companies will have their personas broken down by country, region, age etc. This lets them tailor their messaging and marketing strategies more efficiently and allows for greater personalisation within their marketing messaging. 

If we look at our Kold Weather Wear example above again we can see how two disparate groups both love and use the same product for different reasons. By creating two marketing personas: one for their existing male explorer customers and one for their younger fashion focused customers, Kold Weather Wear can begin to target each group individually and produce tailored marketing campaigns for each one that will increase their conversion and profits.     

These campaigns could vary greatly depending on the buyer personas. Kold Weather Wear might choose Instagram, Tik Tok and influencer marketing to reach their younger fashion focused audiences.

For their older, male explorer demographic they might choose to take out ads in print media that focused on climbing and mountaineering or sponsor sporting events. 

This quick example shows you how a detailed marketing persona can really inform and tailor the approach you take to your marketing efforts. 

Your strategy should always start and end with your buyer persona. 

So where do you start?

We might have jumped a bit ahead of ourselves there, before we can even consider creating multiple buyer personas for our product, services and locations we need to take a step back and focus on creating our first buyer persona.  

If you’re a business leader or marketing manager that’s never heard of a buyer persona before don’t worry. The prospect of having to make multiple personas for all your products and services can be daunting but the easiest way to get the ball rolling is by creating one overarching buyer persona for your entire business.

This persona can act like your brands North Star and all other buyer personas you create can be variations or deviation from this main persona. Through creating this persona you’ll likely spot a few discrepancies and variations in your data you can explore and flesh out for future personas. So when you’re getting all the information for your first persona make sure you make a lot of notes of anything unusual you find.   

How do you make your buyer persona and what should one look like?

Buyer personas come in many different shapes and sizes as every company creates their own. There are loads of persona templates available for free on the internet and when you’re creating your first buyer persona it’s a good idea to take inspiration from a few of them and then come up with your own. 

That being said, generally speaking a buyer persona normally looks like the cross between a fact sheet and a CV. This document contains all the information you have on your buyer persona and it should be presented as a semi-fictional fact file which contains this personas name, age, picture, likes, dislikes, shopping habits, frustrations etc.

If you’d like to see some examples of buyer personas you can check out 10 on this blog post.

What information should you include in your buyer persona and where can you find it? 

Your buyer persona can be as long or as short as you like. We think one double sided A4 piece of paper is enough to get down all the information you need about your buyer persona. You don’t want it to be too long. 

You should be able to take a quick look at your persona and align yourself with the mentality and tone of your ideal customer quickly. If you’ve got to read pages and pages of text to get this information your persona is too long.  

With that being said there’s three types of information your persona should include and those are: Brand Generated Information, Hard Information and Soft Insights. We’ll go over these three types of information now and tell you how to find each one. 

Brand generated information

You need to make this information up yourself. That’s why its brand generated, your brand. Things like your buyer personas name and picture fall into this category. And yes, you should 100% name your buyer persona and have a picture of them.

It’s far easier to market to a person than a collection or statistics. By simply giving your persona a name and picture you go a long way in humanising it. This is important if you want to make sure your brand tone and messaging is human and appealing to your persona. 

It’s far easier to get inside the head of buyer persona like “Chet” or “Cindy” and ask if your messaging would resonate with them rather than guessing what an unnamed, un-fleshed out persona would think. 

So where do you get this information?

When it comes to your brand generated information there is an element of guess work involved. Especially when it comes to the name of your persona. Use your own intuition along with the hard information you have on your persona to think up a believable and plausible name for your persona. 

The two names we mentioned above, “Chet” and “Cindy” are a bit out there for a UK brand. Make sure you can really see yourself speaking to your persona. 

As for the picture, you can use an image site like Shutterstock or Pixabay to find someone who looks like your buyer persona. Make sure your picture is informed by your hard information too. If your buyer personas age is 24 don’t have a picture of a 40 year old. 

If you get permission from a customer you could use their picture too. That’s a great way to add a real face to your buyer persona just be aware of any GDPR implications. 

Hard information

Hard information is quantifiable data that isn’t open to interpretation. Things like: where your customers are located, how old they are, what jobs they do, what industries they work in are all examples of hard information. You can’t disagree with a colleague about someone’s age, it is what it is. 

When it comes to adding hard information to your buyer persona you’ll need to do some data analysis and find common trends and patterns within the data you have on your current and previous customers.

An easy way to understand this is by looking at the age of your buyer persona. Finding the average age of all your previous customers would be the easiest way to find the age of your buyer persona. 

Things like location can be done quantifiably too. By creating a chart of all the different places your customers live you can spot a front runner and use that as your buyer personas location. 

Side Note:

Looking at the location of your buyer persona is a great example of how you can spot smaller trends in your customer data that could lead you to make other buyer personas later in your business journey. 

For example, your customer data could show you that 90% of your sales came from North West England and out of those sales 70% came from Manchester. So, when you’re making your first buyer persona it’d make complete sense to base your persona in Manchester. 

But when you were doing your analysis you saw that out of that 70% that bought your product 30% were based in Didsbury and 25% were based in Chorlton. This is useful information you could use to further detail your buyer persona or split it up completely into two new personas each focused on a section of Manchester.  

Where can you find hard information on your buyer persona? 

When it comes to gathering the hard information on your customers to make your buyer persona analytics and inbound marketing tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console are essential. 

These tools will give you the hard data on your customers like their location, spending habits, the average amount they spend on your products and other important things. You can even use it to see what things your customers are interested in and put that into your buyer persona. 

Other ways you can gather hard information on your customers is by sending out feedback surveys to get information straight from your customers and also by reviewing your current emails lists and client database. If you use a tool like Salesforce you could dive into your CMS data to spot trends and find out information about your buyer persona.   

When it comes to looking at your customer data you’ll need to do some analysis to find the hard information about your buyer persona. You’ll need to find averages, trends and ‘most likely’ answers and use them to create your persona. Just remember, you can save any smaller trends or patterns you find in your data for any future personas you want to make. 

What can you do if you have no hard information on your buyer persona?

This is a common problem for businesses that are just starting out. Your company might be brand new and you probably don’t have a backlog of client data and website insights to look at to help you build your buyer persona. If that’s the case what do you do?

The only thing you can do is guesstimate who your buyer persona is as much as possible and then keep reviewing and tweaking it as you get more sales and more insights into who your customer is. 

All companies should be doing this anyway. Your buyer persona will hardly ever stay the same. As your business grows your company will change, so will the age of the people who buy off you. 

If you’ve been in business for 10 years have you brought the same customers along on the journey with you? If so you’re messaging and their persona will be vastly different from 10 years ago. 

It’s always ALWAYS worth reviewing your personas when you can. Once a year at minimum. Doing this keeps them fresh in your mind and lets you adapt them as necessary.

Soft Insights  

Soft insights are any information you’ve received of your customers that could be open to interpretation. In a way these insights are the most valuable to you as they are the closest indication you have about what your customers really want. 

Things like your customers’ problems, hopes and obstacles are all soft insights. What do they want from their life and what do they want your product or services to do from them? This might sound a bit intense but it’s this level of insight that is going to really help you connect with your customers on a deep and meaningful level. 

Your hard information might tell you your buyer persona is a 25-30 year old female living in Chorlton but it’s not going to tell you how they like to be spoken to or what issues in their lives they really want solved. This is where your soft insights come in. 

We call them soft insights because, as we mentioned above, the insights are open to interpretation and customer discretion. A lot of the information you’ll gather to build your buyer persona’s soft insights will come from your customer. But, they might not tell you the truth, they might not know what their real problems are or they might describe an idealised picture of themselves to you when you chat with them. 

This means you need to be critical of your soft insights and make sure you’re probing them to get to the real heart of what your customer is telling you.

Like your hard information, the more soft insights you get the better the picture of your customer becomes. You can spot trends in what your customers are telling you and you’ll begin to notice insights that are outliers and don’t represent the majority of your customers thoughts. 

Soft insights are the hardest ones to get of your customers but also the most valuable. Below we’ll share a few ways you can get them. 

Where can you find soft insights on your buyer persona?

The best way to get soft insights on your customers is through surveying them, or, if you can, talking to them face-to-face. Speaking to your customer directly might sound a bit scary but most customers love to hear from a brand they’ve purchased from and, more often than not, will talk your ear off about the reasons they bought your product. Insights like this are invaluable to getting to the heart of what your buyer persona wants. 

You could talk to them directly after a purchase or send out a feedback form a day or two after they’ve bought from you. However you get the information just remember, the more you ask of your customer the more they’ll want from you. You need to incentivise people to share their insights and the more questions you ask the more they’ll want. 

Offering a prize draw from completed feedback forms is a great way to boost the amount of soft insights you can get from your customers. Whatever you decide to offer, if you offer anything at all, just make sure it’ll incentivise your customers to leave their feedback. 

So you’ve got all your information and insights, now what?

Once you’ve gathered all the information you can from your customers you need to combine it all together into a buyer persona document. We mentioned what one should look like earlier in the article and we’ll re-share the examples here. The important thing to remember is that’s it your buyer persona document so you should be happy with how it reads and looks. 

There’s no set way of making a persona so as long as you’re comfortable with it that should be your main concern.

Do you need help creating your first buyer persona?

Need help creating your first buyer persona? We’re an SEO agency in Manchester with a team of digital marketing experts who can help get to grips with who your customer really is. Contact us to see how we can help you know your customer better.