Buyer Personas Shouldn’t Stick To The Shallows
(Try To Put a Bit of Effort Into Them)
Zero pesticides. Unbelievable. Photo by @vindemia on Unsplash.
Natty Wine Nathan, Supply Chain Sally and TikTok Timmy sit at the centre of your laptop screen with all their stock-photo gloss. They are alliterative, slightly jarring and created to represent a group of ideal customers.
There’s nothing wrong with a Natty Wine Nathan. But only if he does what any good buyer persona should do: Provide clear guidance to brands wanting to engage with a group of ideal customers. If he’s just a figment of a marketer’s imagination that’s used stereotypes for flimsy groundwork, then he’s about to waste a lot of campaign money.
Natty Wine Nathan is a profile rich with specific details that will have your brand using exactly the right messaging across any number of touchpoints. It could be campaign copy, a brief sales call or a subtle change to an existing product.
What They Shouldn’t Look Like
A buyer persona should not just be based on demographics and hollow stereotypes. If you’re creating a Millennial persona you’ll need to appeal to more than just an age range, location and mild preference for overpriced avocado on toast. They’ll get your brand in front of selected eyeballs but that’s about it.
You need to know what makes your ideal customers tick. And wield this in such a way that they won’t scroll past or cover their ears at the sight or sound of your brand.
A single, unfamiliar colloquialism in an ad could confuse viewers, and one too many exclamation marks on your homepage could be deeply upsetting.
What They Should Look Like
Generally, a good buyer persona should include:
Demographics and general background information, such as age, location and job title
Goals and challenges, both personal and professional
Communication preferences
How your brand or offering solves their problems
Real or fictional quotes from a typical member of the group with specific keywords
Key messaging that will resonate with them
Additions and subtractions can be made depending on whether you’re targeting B2B or B2C prospects. Purchasing processes, for instance, could be a more prominent factor for a B2B persona who has to convince stakeholders and navigate complicated internal processes in their company. This is their professional challenge.
A single persona needs to summarise the story behind a group of ideal customers. Knowing someone’s hopes and dreams will take your messaging and marketing efforts a lot further than their age and income. You can find some of Adobe’s succinct examples here.
Researching Your Ideal Customers
Creating a persona that helps brands effectively engage groups of their ideal customers requires lots of data. If you’re a small business just starting up, you could be lacking in this department. But there are ways around this.
Utilise External Data
If you’re just starting a business without a sale or lead in sight, using industry reports and conducting a competitor analysis will give you an idea of existing trends and user groups. There will be breakdowns of demographic data giving you the building blocks for a particular persona, as well as statistics on certain industry leaders—both should provide inspiration for realising and communicating your differentiators.
Although the prospect of processing this information could be daunting at first, it will help you make key decisions. For instance, deciding which gaps to exploit in the market—often created by groups with specific challenges, interests or concerns.
Social Media Listening
Social media listening is a sound way to analyse online conversations about your brand, industry and competitors—observing the landscape lets you know when and where to tread carefully. Establishing what your ideal customers are talking about and where they can be found online will add another layer to a buyer persona, letting you craft well-timed and carefully placed messages.
Using Existing Insights and Conversations
If you’ve already carried out consumer interviews and sent out surveys, then this is where you’ll pick up important quantitative and qualitative data.
Demographic data like age ranges and locations is necessary for targeting; whereas psychographic information like interests, challenges and personal motivations can help you understand which buttons to press at what point of the customer journey. Just be sure to ask the right questions, and always get permission before using any direct quotes in a persona profile.
Remember to look at your sales and support logs for insights about your customer interactions. Are there particular questions from customers or prospects that keep appearing? How about sticking points when trying to finalise a sale? These insights will help you craft a more nuanced persona that guides your messaging right down to crunch time.
Website data
Online tools like Google Analytics will also help you to understand the demographics, behaviours and preferences of those visiting your website. While this data won’t provide much in the way of worldly quotations, it will still give you an idea of intent: Search queries, pages visited, time spent on pages, bounce rates and conversion paths will give away the digital calling card of potential customer segments.
As with the information from industry reports, you can segment the demographics, psychographics and other quantitative data to identify patterns that form the broad strokes of buyer personas. Does a certain age range like one feature of your product or service more than any other? Do city dwellers seem to spend less time on a certain web page than those in the suburbs? Note it all down.
Selection and Storytelling
Having sifted through your research, you may already have a few segments in mind based on rough demographic data and online behaviour profiles. They could look something like:
Age 25-35, Location: Major European Cities, Income: €55,000 - €82,000, Marketing Manager
Age 35-45, Location: City suburbs, Income: €110,000 - €165,000, Senior Manager/Director
Age 45-60, Location: Major European Cities, Income: €220,000+, C-Suite
With these rough segments outlined, it’s time to create comprehensive persona profiles by picking out elements of your research you believe represent a certain group (yes, you saw these earlier):
Demographics and general background information, such as age, location and job title
Goals and challenges, both personal and professional
Communication preferences
How your brand or offering solves their problems
Real or fictional quotes from a typical member of the group with specific keywords
Key messaging that will resonate with them
Many sites offer persona templates, such as HubSpot and Semrush. These are easy to fill in and share—something I’d recommend doing with selected colleagues for a final check. Having another set of eyes look over a persona will help refine a key sentence or remove a slightly off-topic quote.
Using Your Personas
Remember, buyer personas are a tool. They should be helpful and not add more confusion to a process. Members of Marketing, Sales, Product and other departments should be able to use these profiles to aid their decision-making processes. So, once you’ve completed your drafts, run them by select colleagues for a final check.
Now, you’re ready to start crafting content, practising elevator pitches and tweaking products.
Do It All Over Again
Well, not quite. Good personas should be continuously updated because people and technology change; the challenges that needed to be addressed yesterday won’t necessarily be the same next week. Plus, as you gather more data from new customers, campaigns and the actions of competitors, you’ll likely want to tweak a word here or there in your messaging. You may even find a new group of customers entirely.
A Quick Word on Negative Personas
Negative personas aren’t bad people. They’re simply the type of customer you don’t want to use your product or service. For instance, you may wish to exclude a particular persona to avoid wasting time and money targeting those too old, young or overqualified for your offering.
Need a Helping Hand?
Whether it’s levelling up your existing copy, creating newsletters that won’t end up in the trash or crafting articles that get your messages out to the right sets of eyeballs, SullyCopy is here to help.
