In our previous articles, we emphasized the importance of understanding your customers to put your brand in a unique position. Customer Journey allows you to understand what customers experience and feel while interacting with your brand. Empathy Mapping helps you understand what your customers are feeling, thinking, doing, and saying. In this article, we will explain another tool that will perfectly complement the aforementioned tools: Buyer Persona.

What is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a fictional profile/character that is representing your ideal customer based on research, data and insight. Creating this persona allows you to understand and empathize with your target customers, creating three strategic advantages:

1. You know who can and cannot be your next customer: specific targeting,
2. You know how to communicate with your existing customers and prospects: customized interaction,
3. You know which needs to address: product/service development.

Two important notes:

1. You might need to create more than one buyer persona, e.g., a buyer persona per segment (for further details, click to read our article on segmentation).
2. You can create negative buyer persona to picture who to exclude from your potential customers.

How to Create a Buyer Persona?

1. Decide which information will be included in your persona model. Usually a buyer persona includes demographics (age, sex, income, marital status, job, etc.), behaviors (spending behavior, communication preferences, objections), personality (goals, motivation, interests), details (real quotes, name, face, etc.). It is important to balance detail level. Too much detail will overly narrow your efforts and thoughts; too broad picture will make you lose your focus.
2. Analyze existing data. Before diving deep into customer visits and interviews, reviewing reports on hand and working on your database will save you time and money.
3. Do more research. You can run market researches or conduct customer visits to dig more. Guiding your sales force and customer service personnel with examplary questions, and activating them can enhance your understanding. If you apply the help of sales force or customer service personnel, please be sure that they can perform well at interviewing customers. Otherwise, their findings will dilute the explicitness of your conclusions.
4. Extract meaningful information. Try to identify patterns and common grounds among different answers. In the end, you need to come up with a relatively homogeneous persona, representing a group of customers.
5. Dig further, if necessary. Sometimes, it may not be easy to comprehend goals, motivations, patterns, differences between personas, etc. If you cannot visualize the buyer persona clear enough via previous research findings, then, dig further.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that having a comprehensive understanding of your customers is crucial for many aspects of your business. Buyer Persona is an effective framework to unveil customer insight to gain three strategic advantages: specifying your most valuable customers and prospects, customizing your interaction with them, and developing products/services in line with their needs.

In order to distinguish your business from the competitors via customer insight, contact us and let us explain how we can help you.