How to Create a Buyer Persona (Free Buyer/Viewers Persona Template)

As a kid, you may have an imaginary boyfriend. Social media marketers have them too – only in this case they are called Buyers people or Public personalities.

Unlike your imaginary friend, however, these fictional characters don’t exist just to freak out your parents. They are an incredibly helpful tool for targeting your ideal customer.

As a social marketer – or any other marketer – it is easy to get lost in the details of tracking your latest engagement rates and marketing campaigns. Buyer Personas remind you to put your audience’s wants and needs above your own and help you create content to better appeal to your ideal customer.

What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is a detailed description of the person who represents you target group. This persona is fictional but based on thorough research of your existing or desired audience.

You can also refer to it as a customer, audience, or marketing persona.

You can’t get to know each customer or prospect individually. However, you can create a customer personality to represent your customer base. (That being said, since different types of customers can buy your products for different reasons, you may need to create more than one buyer personality.)

You give this buyer personality a name, demographic details, interests, and behavioral characteristics. You will understand their goals, weaknesses, and buying patterns. You can even give them a face with stock photography or illustration if you want – because putting a face to a name may be important for your team.

Basically, you want to think about and talk about this model customer as if you were a real person. This is a great way to create marketing messages aimed specifically at them.

By keeping an eye on your buyer persona (or personas), the voice and direction of everything from product development to your branding voice to the social channels you use will stay consistent.

Why use a buyer or audience persona?

Buyer Personas keep you focused on customer priorities rather than your own.

Think about your buyer personas every time you make a decision about yours Social marketing strategy (or general marketing strategy).

Does a new campaign meet the needs and goals of at least one of your buyer personas? If not, you have good reason to reconsider your plan, no matter how exciting it may be.

Once you have defined your buyer personas, you can create organic posts and social ads that directly target the target customers you have defined. Social advertising, in particular, offers incredibly detailed Social targeting options so that your ad reaches exactly the right people.

Build your social media strategy by helping your personas achieve their goals and bond with the real customers they represent. It’s about building brand loyalty and trust to ultimately streamline your sales process.

How to create a buyer persona step by step

Your buyer persona shouldn’t just be someone you want to hang out with: it should be based on real data and strategic goals. Here’s how to create a fictional customer who is a perfect match for your real-world brand.

1. Do a thorough audience research

It’s time to dig deep. Who are your existing customers? Who is your social audience? Who are your competitors targeting? You can find more information about these concepts in our Complete guide to audience research, but in the meantime …

Get audience data from your. together Social media analysis (particularly Insights into the Facebook audience), Your customer database and Google Analytics to narrow down details like:

• age
• Location
• language
• Purchasing power and patterns
• Interests
• challenges
• Stage of life
• For B2B: The size of the company and who makes purchasing decisions

It’s also a good idea to make sure you understand which social channels your audience uses. Find out where they’re already spending time online with tools like Hootsuite Insights powered by Brandwatch, Keyhole.co and Google Analytics.

You can also marginalize Who are competitors targeting with tools like Buzzsumo and the Hootsuite search streams.

For more detailed strategies, see our full post on how to conduct competitive research with social tools.

2. Identify customer goals and pain points

Your target audience’s goals can be personal or professional, depending on the products and services you are selling. What motivates your customers? What’s your endgame?

On the other hand are their pain points. What problems or problems are your prospects trying to solve? What is stopping you from being successful? What obstacles do you face in achieving your goals?

Your sales team and customer service department are great ways to find answers to these questions, but another important option is to get involved in a few social listening and Social media sentiment analysis.

If you set up search streams to monitor mentions of your brand, products, and competitors, you can see what people are saying about you online in real time. You can learn why they love your products or which parts of the customer experience just don’t work.

3. Understand how you can help

Now that you have your customers’ goals and problems under control, it is time to start thinking about how you can help. That means thinking beyond the functions and analyzing the real benefits of your product or service.

A feature is what your product is or does. One benefit is how your product or service makes your customers’ lives easier or better.

Are you considering your audience’s most important buying barriers and where are your followers on their buying journey? And then ask yourself: How can we help? Summarize the answer in one clear sentence.

4. Create your buyer personas

Gather all of your research and look for common traits. When you put these characteristics together, you get the foundation for your unique customer personalities.

Give your buyer persona a name, job title, home and other distinctive features. You want your personality to look like a real person.

For example, suppose you identify a core customer base as a 40 year old professionally successful, urban woman with no children and a passion for great restaurants. Your buyer persona could be “High-Achiever Haley”.

• She is 41 years old.
• She goes to the spinning class three times a week.
• She lives in Toronto and is the founder of her own PR company.
• She owns a Tesla.
• She and her partner go on two international vacations a year and prefer to stay in boutique hotels.
• She is a member of a wine club.

You get the basics: this isn’t just a list of properties. This is a detailed, specific description of a prospect. It allows you to think about your prospective buyer in a human way so that they are not just a collection of data points. These things may not necessarily apply to every buyer in your audience, but they help portray an archetype in a tangible way.

Aim for roughly the amount of information you would expect on a dating site (but don’t forget to include pain points … that wouldn’t necessarily fall on Bumble).

As you craft your customer personas, be sure to describe who each persona is now and who they want to be. This allows you to think about how your products and services can help them achieve these goals.

Buyer Persona Examples

Brands can create and share their buyer personas with the team in a number of ways. It could be a bullet list; it could be a robust multi-paragraph story. It can contain an archive photo or an illustration. There’s no wrong way to format these reference documents: do it the way it will help your team best understand your customers (and target people).

A beauty-conscious, magazine-loving mother named Karla

Here is an example from the UX designer James Donovan. It concretizes a buyer personality for a fictional customer named Karla Kruger, including details about her job, age and demographics – and of course her weaknesses and goals. She is 41 years old and pregnant, and we have vivid details about her product preferences and her beauty routine.

The interesting thing about this example is that it also includes their media consumption and favorite brands. Details are key to bringing a customer personality to life, so get specific!

Here we also see where “Karla” lies in different spectra of brand loyalty, social influence and price sensitivity. If knowing these kind of details about your customer is important, find this information in your research phase and include it in your persona template!

A suburban chef loyal to the brand

This example of Survey monkey a buyer persona breathes life into a fictional data analyst. We learn something about her education and her place of residence, but also about her interests and passions – she likes to cook and travel, values ​​her relationships and is loyal to the brand.

If this were your company’s prototype customer, how would that affect your marketing strategy or product offering? A well-defined buyer persona helps with every decision you make.

A dog-loving young professional

For this buyer persona, created by a digital marketing agency Single grain, we learn about Tommy Technology’s income and love life, as well as his career struggles. Including some quotes (either repurposed or made up by real customers) can also help give voice to such a character.

Buyer persona template

Are you ready to put together your first buyer persona? Our free Buyer Personality template in Google Docs is a great place to start:

To use the template, click the File tab and choose Make a Copy from the drop-down menu. Now you have your very own version that you can fill in as you wish.

Think about your buyer personas every time you make a decision about your social media content and overall marketing strategy. When you get these personas right, you’ll build bonds with the real customers they represent – and increase sales and brand loyalty.

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