How to Create Buyer Personas: A Comprehensive Guide with Examples

What is the foundation of your current marketing strategy? Is it simple intuition or well-conducted market analysis? One of the core digital marketing principles emphasizes relying on statistical data rather than mere guesswork. This is where buyer personas come in handy. By dedicating your time and resources to understanding your target audience, you can boost sales and improve brand interactions with consumers.

Develop your buyer persona if you haven’t already. This article explains how to do so, provides a complete description of different customer profiles, and offers examples for both B2C and B2B segments.

What you will find in this article:

What is a buyer persona? A brief definition

In marketing, a buyer persona is a comprehensive description of individuals who embody your ideal target audience. While such portrayals are fictitious, they’re built through in-depth research of your current or desired clients. It may also be referred to as a customer persona, audience persona, or marketing persona.

Creating a buyer persona is about getting a clear picture of who your customers are. This information helps marketers to develop promotional and communication strategies that meet specific target audience needs.

To get free downloads, click the banner above, switch to «Annual Upfront» subscriptions, and press the «Free 7 Day Trial» button.

Why are buyer personas important for business?

Your business may find it challenging to thrive in the market without creating a buyer persona. After all, any marketing effort begins with an understanding of who your target customer is, their desires, constraints, and pain points. Below are four reasons to craft your marketing personas if you haven’t done so yet:

Providing a personalized experience. Since 2021, an increasing number of companies have been moving away from generic communicational approaches. Instead, they have been embracing account-based marketing. The method involves narrowing down the target audience to focus on the most valuable prospects, where customized messages are crucial. This shift is driven by the fact that 77% of consumers prefer recommending and buying from brands that deliver personalized experiences. Besides, 74% of clients experience frustration if website content isn’t personalized. Once you’ve developed a buyer persona, you’ll gain a clear understanding of the desires, pain points, habits, and goals of your key customers. This knowledge allows you to effectively address their challenges. For example, you can create a social media content plan that directly addresses user questions and concerns.
Getting higher quality leads. Marketing Insider group states that 56% of businesses generate more relevant prospects after developing buyer personas. A well-crafted buyer persona provides insights into who is most likely to purchase your products or services, enabling you to build high-quality customer databases. For example, successful lead generation depends on the choice of promotional channels (social media, email, direct website traffic, etc). When you have a clear understanding of the specific tools your leads use, it’s easier to improve nurturing strategies. What’s more, building buyer personas will help you customize your content to address their specific pain points, leading to an increase in high-quality leads.
Reducing sales cycles. While marketing and sales departments should work hand in hand, misunderstandings often come up in practice. This happens because marketers often pass on all the received leads without a clear qualification process. Consequently, a significant amount of time is wasted on trying to profile potential customers, understand their pain points, and assess their relevance. With a well-defined buyer persona in mind, the marketing department can independently qualify the leads they receive. This significantly simplifies the sales team’s work. As a result, they have more time to focus on working with their target customers.
Improving communication strategy. Picture this scenario: you’re excitedly talking to someone about the latest technological advancements, but they don’t participate in the conversation because it doesn’t interest them. It’s the same when you lack a clear understanding of who your ideal customer is. You might be discussing the benefits of your product, only to discover that the audience is concerned about something entirely different. Creating a buyer persona addresses this issue. Moreover, it is a guiding beacon in shaping your marketing communications, encompassing pertinent content topics, tone of voice, and calls to action.

Unlocking the Potential of Account-Based Marketing: Key Strategies

4 types of buyer personas

When purchasing or seeking professional services, people may rely on the logical or emotional side. Moreover, decision-making speed also varies from person to person. That’s why there are four identified types of buyer personas. This classification is based on polarities.

Spontaneous

Spontaneous buying personas are individuals who make purchasing decisions based on their emotions. Just five minutes ago, they decided to embark on a trip to another country, and now they’re already booking a tour. Spontaneous buyers don’t tend to ponder their decisions for very long.

Because these buyer personas are impulsive, it’s crucial to ensure user-friendly interactions with your company. For example, if you provide a form on your website, make it as clear and straightforward as possible. Otherwise, a spontaneous buyer might lose patience and not complete the intended action.

Here are a few more tips on how to cater to spontaneous buyers:

Provide multiple contact information options, such as a prominently displayed phone number or a clickable email address.
Create easy-to-understand marketing materials, guiding the buyer’s attention toward the desired action.
Offer a live chat option where they can quickly get answers to their pressing questions in text format.
Pay particular attention to the mobile version of your website.

Marketing triggers: emotions, limited-time offers, “buy one, get one free” deals, and a focus on convenient and quick purchasing.

Competitive

Unlike spontaneous buyers, competitive ones make decisions based on logic, doing this swiftly. Moreover, they prioritize quality over price. For example, when selecting furniture, they pay particular attention to its materials and durability.

Because these buyers value assurances, it’s crucial to emphasize what sets you apart from competitors when engaging with them. This could be a unique business focus, a distinctive product range, or notable accomplishments.

To capture the interest of such customers:

Showcase your distinguishing features, featuring awards and testimonials from well-known clients.
Develop before-and-after content to highlight your expertise and results.
Invest in PR promotion—publish articles and press releases in online media and magazines.
Keep your contact details easily accessible.

Marketing triggers: data, statistics, testimonials, transparent pricing, recognition, case studies, exclusive options, and loyalty programs.

How to Make Sense of Your Data? A Guide to Data-Driven Marketing

Humanistic

These consumer personas tend to make decisions guided by emotions, but unlike spontaneous buyers, they do so at a much slower pace. This is because brand vision should resonate with them.

Humanistic buyers aren’t particularly interested in your awards, proofs, or endorsements. Instead, they want to know people behind the scenes of your business.

To appeal to such buyers, consider the following:

Showcase realistic photos to illustrate your dedication to the client’s cause.
Get involved in socially significant projects.
Utilize storytelling techniques to provide insight into your company’s inner workings.
Demonstrate empathy during your communications.
Highlight key employees and their interests outside of work.

Marketing triggers: social impact, unique mission and values, transparency, philanthropy, donations, educational content, regular feedback, and community building.

Methodical

These marketing personas highly appeal to the logical side, but they’re slow in their decision-making. Methodical consumers enjoy exploring companies and thoroughly studying their products or services. Moreover, it’s essential for such buyers to feel confident that they’ve made the right choice by choosing your business.

Methodical buyers are meticulous; they will scrutinize every page of your website, reread your articles, and search for your brand’s social media accounts. The strategy for dealing with such buyers involves systematically providing high-quality content like ebooks, newsletters, and market analysis. To put it simply, you need to create a lead magnet funnel that offers data in exchange for contact information.

How to engage with such customers:

Pay special attention to product specifications and descriptions.
Ensure transparent pricing.
Offer free demos and trial versions.
Provide robust technical support.
Supply clear details of your collaboration, including timing, preferred communication channels, and reports.

Marketing triggers: in-depth content, comprehensive product documentation, ROI estimations, data-driven insights, comparative analysis, and case studies with key results.

To get free downloads, click the banner above, switch to «Annual Upfront» subscriptions, and press the «Free 7 Day Trial» button.

Buyer persona example

Since each company utilizes its own approaches for creating a buyer persona, it may be unclear to you what qualities and statements can be used. To clarify this, we’ve provided one of our buyer persona examples. It is tailored to IT companies that provide outsourcing services. By examining this case, you can craft your document for another niche.

Name: Derek Evans

Description: Derek is a product owner in a large technology company. He is responsible for managing project success, but frequently faces challenges due to short release time and a large number of bugs. Derek makes decisions by relying on numbers and facts.

Demographics:

Age: 38
Gender: Male
Location: Berlin, Germany
Education: Master’s Degree in Computer Science.
Job title: Product owner
Monthly income: €8,000
Family life: Married.

Buying behavior:

Buying habits: Relies on data and figures, compares service prices from different suppliers, and seeks actual industry-specific case studies.
Goals: To find a software development company to outsource at an affordable price. The vendor must boost development speed so that Derek’s project will be released in time.
Pain points: He is afraid of low-quality development, which can lead to an increased number of bugs and additional spendings to fix them.

Challenges an IT company may address:

Needs: To provide accurate software development estimation where all additional tasks and their cost can be discussed.
Motivations: To release a project on time and improve his technical product.
Persona’s journey: Derek initiates his research on review platforms like Clutch. He thoroughly examines clients’ testimonials. When discussing a project, he also asks for additional materials. If a company lacks experience in a specific niche, he’ll opt out of collaborating. While working directly with contractors, Derek values receiving comprehensive reports on completed tasks and the budget spent. He might become anxious if the estimated time deviates significantly from the results.

Taking a closer look at Derek’s profile can serve as a basis for a robust marketing strategy. The company should focus on collecting current customer reviews and showcasing them on review platforms. The marketing team should also try to craft comprehensive case studies that thoroughly detail the achieved results. It’s ideal if these case studies include data and key performance indicators that showcase improvements through the company’s collaboration. Throughout the partnership, account managers should maintain proactive communication with such clients.

Why Social Listening Matters? Definitions, Benefits, and Tips

How to create a buyer persona

1. Conducting your target audience research

Understanding how your products are bought requires in-depth, data-driven marketing approaches. But where can you find the necessary information for research? If you already have a well-established brand, consider utilizing Google Analytics features.

Google Analytics is a web tool that provides insights into the demographic and behavioral aspects of your consumers. To access this information, open your Google Analytics and navigate to the “User” section → “User Attributes.”

Let’s explore the most necessary tabs (relevant for GA4):

The overview tab. It offers general information about your website users. You can examine graphs that break down data by country, city, gender, interests, and language preferences.
The demographic data tab. This section allows you to delve into user interaction patterns, featuring various countries. For example, you can see the number of sessions. This information can be invaluable for market expansion.
The audience tab. Here, you can trace the detailed user journey to your website. GA4 allows you to set up custom goals. For example, you can track traffic sources, device types, preferred languages, and more.

Pro tip: Analyze data from Google Analytics for the entire history of your company. You can set custom reporting periods and even compare different time frames.

If you’re just launching your business, you might not have sufficient user data yet. In this case, you can analyze the market through marketing surveys. You can schedule interviews with customers or use Google Forms for this purpose. Nonetheless, your surveys should match your unique business characteristics and goals.

If you’re actively promoting your business on social media, a valuable tool for gathering marketing analytics can be Facebook Audience Insights. Here, you can access demographic data about your audience and explore specific market segments.

2. Segmenting your audience

Marketing analysis can encompass a vast amount of data, so it’s essential to narrow it down and pinpoint key patterns. In simpler terms, you should create a vivid and representative image of your typical customers.

To do this, select characteristics that will be useful in building buyer personas:

Demographics: age, marital status, gender, ethnicity.
Behaviors: skills, expertise, interests, hobbies, product usage, content consumption habits.
Geographics: primary location or region where customers reside.
Challenges: pain points and problems your potential clients seek to solve.
Interests: hobbies and passions.
Communication preferences: frequency and reasons to communicate with your company.

Throughout the segmentation process, you can identify several buyer personas.

Brand Affinity: Definitions, Benefits, and Key Strategies

3. Arranging brainstorming sessions

Different departments within your company possess varying pieces of information. Therefore, it’s crucial to involve multiple teams in the buyer persona development process. These can include marketers, sales managers, and leadership. Brainstorming sessions, where each participant can share their thoughts on the matter, are a highly effective practice.

Here are some tips for organizing productive brainstorming sessions:

Clearly define the objectives of creating a buyer persona for your company.
Utilize the silent technique, where each session participant writes down their ideas, followed by a group discussion.
Develop a preliminary buyer persona during the session.
Discuss which personas take priority for your business.
Appoint someone responsible for the ongoing development and updating of marketing personas.

A valuable tool for conducting brainstorming sessions is FigJam. It’s an interactive platform where you can attach notes, draw, set timers, and create detailed charts.
#4 Outlining persona details in a document

Once you’ve completed all the preceding steps and identified one or more of the most appropriate buyer personas, it’s time to document this information in a clear and organized manner and include it in your marketing plan.

Key elements to include are:

Demographics
Background
Objectives
Pain points
Behavior
Preferences
Shopping habits
Communication channels

5. Visualizing your buyer personas

You can stop at the buyer persona document development stage. Nonetheless, visualizing can be a good practice. It allows your sales and marketing departments to memorize information through vivid imagery. You can use various stock images, create names, add visuals with key attributes, and more. If you’re not proficient in design, explore online services, e.g., UXPressia.

As a result, you should get a detailed description that encompasses your marketing buyer personas’ essential characteristics. They include age, gender, location, income, education, professional role, aspirations, objectives, pain points, challenges, preferred communication channels, content consumption habits, favorite social media platforms, shopping patterns, and more.

Cause Marketing: Meaning, Benefits, and Top Strategies

How to use developed buyer personas effectively

Tailor your content and communication strategy to meet the buyer persona’s needs.

All of your company’s messages should cater to your clients’ preferences and address their pain points. For example, if your customers aim to achieve financial independence, provide guidance on how to do so through expert articles or social media post series. What’s more, your clients may resonate with different styles of information presentation; some are drawn to facts, while others are swayed by emotions. After defining buyer personas, you can develop your unique tone of voice. This enables you to speak the language of your audience. Remember that high-quality content always stems from a customer-centric perspective. Replace “We” with “You” in your messages.

Choose promotional channels based on your buyer persona profile.

Some clients prefer communication via email, while a strong brand social media presence is vital for others. Once you develop buyer personas, it gets easier to precisely determine which channel works best. However, it’s important to understand that a solid strategy often involves a combination of different approaches. For example, if you run an eCommerce store, you can employ remarketing techniques on social media or create personalized offers through email marketing.

Refine and develop your products to align them with your buyer personas.

Every successful product addresses specific tasks and customer pain points. While you can make hypotheses, practical experience shows that relying on real research is key. Furthermore, many companies offer similar products and services, so your goal is to stand out. For example, if you provide marketing automation services, consider what unique features could be beneficial to users. This might include audience segmentation or the ability to finely customize message personalization.

Expand and update your buyer personas from time to time.

User preferences evolve each year. That’s why it’s important to revisit all your marketing efforts from time to time. Make it a good practice to analyze your existing buyer personas every year. This enables your business to set global goals and achieve them.

To get free downloads, click the banner above, switch to «Annual Upfront» subscriptions, and press the «Free 7 Day Trial» button.

What are common mistakes to avoid when creating buyer personas?

While not having a well-defined buyer persona at all is a critical mistake, there are also some subtleties to consider during description development. Let’s examine them:

Relying on assumptions. Since good marketing is all about the ability to analyze data, you should build your buyer persona hypothesis based on the currently available information research.
Overgeneralizing. It’s a bad practice to rely on social stereotypes when developing your buyer persona. For example, statements like “Every girl enjoys buying hair care products because it matters to them” can be false.
Creating too many buyer personas. This can be counterproductive because it can be challenging to ensure consistent promotional strategy and messaging for various profiles.
Ignoring your target audience’s evolution. Since consumers are constantly growing, their preferences change from time to time. So, don’t forget to update your buyer persona profiles.
Not involving stakeholders. Although a marketing department is responsible for developing buyer personas and conducting research, ensure that different team members participate in this process. They can provide you with different insights.
Copying your competitors. Surviving in a competitive market with similar products and services is tough. That’s why it’s important to not just mimic your competitors. Instead, you should create a product that genuinely addresses user needs in each specific situation.
Oversimplifying. Avoid relying solely on one information source, like demographics, because people of the same age can have diverse problems and objectives.
Neglecting A/B testing. To determine the most effective strategy for your business, it’s crucial to continuously experiment. For example, when focusing on a particular buyer persona, you can try out different messaging and communication styles.

Wrapping up

Without a well-defined buyer persona, it becomes challenging to grasp your target audience, their preferences, and buying motivations. As a result, your marketing efforts may not be as effective as you’d like them to be. This can negatively impact your sales and brand recognition.

To create a buyer persona, you need to conduct marketing research—this involves collecting up-to-date data about your current customers, refining the findings, and documenting the characteristics of your potential clients. A meticulously developed buyer persona will act as your guide when crafting specific marketing strategies and selecting the most appropriate communication channels.

FAQs

Why create buyer personas?

Developing buyer personas allows businesses and marketing departments to understand their target audience better. For example, you can get answers to questions like what your customers prefer, their pain points, how they make purchasing decisions, etc. If your buyer personas are identified properly, this simplifies customizing content, messaging, and product development to address the unique needs, behaviors, and apprehensions of your target audience.

How do you identify a buyer persona?

To identify your perfect buyer persona, you should start by conducting research. First, it’s necessary to analyze the current data about your customers. For example, you can take a look at your website traffic. To do so, utilize Google Analytics; on the Audience tab, the demography, location, and preferences of your customers are available. Additionally, you can look through your sales data, track client feedback through the support desk, and find insights from your social media followers.

Who should be involved in creating buyer personas?

Employees who directly interact with your customers should be involved in buyer persona development. This can include the marketing department, sales managers, and executives. By analyzing the gathered data, you can arrange brainstorming sessions to identify several buyer personas for your business. Ultimately, marketing professionals are responsible for creating the final outline.

How many buyer personas should I have?

The number of buyer personas you need depends on the nature of your business. When promoting intricate products or services, such as IT solutions, you might require as many as 15 different personas. For simpler businesses, especially in the B2C sector, one or two personas could be sufficient. Nonetheless, if you’re just entering the market, it’s advisable to begin with a single buyer persona and test your marketing hypotheses based on that.