Conversion Rate Optimization Glossary

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Buyer Persona

A buyer persona is a representation of ideal customers or target audiences based on the information gathered about the customers during research and available data on existing customers.

One of the ideas behind creating buyer personas is to capture a wide range of customers and categorize them into different groups based on similarities.

Since there are different categories of customers patronizing a business, the practical thing to do is to create multiple buyer personas to capture each category.

A typical buyer persona should include the following details;

Why is Buyer Persona Important?

As a business owner, a comprehensive buyer persona is one of the critical resources you can have at your disposal because –

  1. It gives an overview of the different categories of your customers and potential buyers and how you can tailor your ads and campaigns to attract them.
  1. With buyer persona, you can better understand your customers’ needs, struggles, and pain points and how you can adjust your business strategy to address their needs and solve their problems.
  1. Creating buyer personas will also give insight into your customers’ behavior, such as how and where they spend most of their time. This can be helpful when drafting content and knowing where and when to promote your product.
  1. Your email marketing and targeted ads now have the potential to be more effective. If your email contacts are segmented based on personas, you can select what message style to use with the different buyer personas.
  1. Your customers also feel seen and appreciated when your products use language or phrases they can relate to.

How to Create a Buyer Persona

Creating a useful buyer persona requires spending time researching potential customers and effort aimed at analyzing data on existing customers.

The goal of creating buyer personas is to know important details about your target audience. Therefore, ensure that the team understands the goal of creating the buyer persona.

Here are the steps to creating a buyer persona

Research potential and existing customers to gain insights into their motivations and thought processes when buying your product. Research can be done through online polls, surveys, and in-person interviews.

Also, you should consider factors like demographic, interests, geographic location, and communication preferences(email or texts) while researching.

One important thing about researching when creating a buyer persona is knowing the right questions to ask, and the one way to know what questions to ask is by understanding your research goal.

Next, you want to identify the customers’ needs, pain points, motivations, and goals they are trying to achieve with your product.

Create different personas based on similarities between customers’ needs, goals, motivations, demographics, challenges, etc. Each persona you create represents a group of consumers with similar characteristics.

Buyer personas represent ideal customers, and ideal customers have their stories, background, interests, challenges, and needs. Therefore, humanize your personas by giving them a name and a story to help you understand them better.

Buyer Personas vs. User Personas

Buyer and user personas are tools used in marketing and product design to understand a target audience better. However, they serve different purposes and are created using different data types.

A buyer persona represents a fictional representation of the ideal customer for a particular product or service. This persona is created using market research, customer data, and other relevant information about the target audience. A buyer persona focuses on the characteristics of the person most likely to make a purchase, such as their demographics, interests, pain points, and buying habits.

On the other hand, a user persona represents a fictional representation of the ideal product or service user. This persona is created using data gathered through user research, such as interviews, surveys, and observational studies. A user persona focuses on the characteristics of the person who will be using the product or service, such as their goals, needs, preferences, and behaviors.