The success of any marketing or branding campaign depends on knowing who it is aimed at. And that is the customer or buyer who is supposed to take advantage of an offer.
To get to know them and reach them with your marketing activities, your first step toward marketing success is to create a buyer or customer persona.
You can think of the buyer persona as a semi-fictional character who represents your ideal customer. The persona is essential for gaining detailed and accurate insights into the lives of your target group. Nevertheless, many companies still decide to skip this part of campaign planning—after all, they already know their customers.
While this may certainly apply to many, a purely emotional understanding of the existing target group can also lead to mistakes. This potential source of error can be significantly reduced with a persona template based on market research and solid data.
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What is the benefit of a buyer or customer persona template?
A buyer persona gives you specific information about how you can organize, budget, and seed your marketing.
Is your buyer group older? Then save yourself the money and effort of social media ads.
Are millennials or Generation Z your ideal target audience? Then the persona template will tell you which social networks and campaign types you should invest your budget in.
Personas reveal where your target demographic is located and where and how they spend their time online. This is precisely why creating a persona is so essential for any marketing success.
Many brands and companies have created their own persona template for each buyer group—especially if they offer different services or products. The next step is to define a different approach for each of these personas from a marketing perspective.
Sounds time-consuming? It is. But once such a persona template has been created, it is highly effective, reliable, and accessible at any time, providing guidance thanks to reliable data and character traits.
She can support you in all your endeavors. Let's say you're relaunching your website. Then you can consult your persona templates and ask about everything from design to usability.
Or perhaps you want to expand your product range with a new brand: in this case, your persona template will tell you everything you need to know to ensure that your target audience can identify with it and that it piques their interest.
Your persona template is the linchpin for every strategic marketing decision you make. The time you invest in researching and analyzing your existing customers and potential new customers pays off. You will then have reliable information at your fingertips about how your target group thinks, reacts, and what appeals to them.
Once you have packaged these insights into personas, you have the perfect starting point for drawing important marketing-related conclusions:
- How will your target audience respond to your individual marketing campaigns?
- What language (meaning style, imagery, etc.) does your target audience speak?
- Which channel is the best way to reach your target audience, and when?
- What type of content (blog, vlog, etc.) is best suited to solving the problems of your target audience?
In short: a persona saves you from speculation and guesswork and reduces the potential for error in your marketing efforts—saving you a lot of money and valuable time.
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What information is important for a persona?
The more detailed and specific your buyer persona is, the more beneficial it will be for your success. It should therefore be based on demographic characteristics as well as behavioral patterns and personal goals. Put yourself in the shoes of your ideal customer and try to understand who this person is as best you can:
- How old is she?
It's best to specify a specific age or at least as narrow an age range as possible. Ranges that are too broad dilute the results and are too vague to draw reliable conclusions. - What gender is she?
Beyond the still-prevalent pink-blue barrier, there are a number of characteristics that differentiate men and women, which you can use to your advantage. - Is she married?
Singles, single parents, and widowed people have different problems and goals than married people. Consider whose reality your product, service, or brand fits better. - Where does she live?
A person's living environment shapes their reality. Whether you live in the countryside or in a big city makes a big difference in your perception. The same applies to whether you rent or own your home. - What does she do?
Here, it is important to determine the profession and possible position, as well as the corresponding income. However, hobbies and leisure activities are just as important. Depending on the product, one may outweigh the other at times, but never exclude it. - What are her goals?
Does she want to pursue a career or improve the world, live healthier, or become wealthy? If you know what your persona template wants to achieve in life, you know where and how to engage her. - What challenges does she face?
This question is closely linked to your persona's goals and life circumstances. Depending on where she is in life and what goals she is pursuing, her circumstances will vary accordingly. - What motivates them to take action?
If you know what motivates them, you can tailor your solution to their needs. Reinforce what drives them and encourage them to accept your offer. - Where does she look for answers and help?
Depending on your preferred platform and format, you can tailor your content to your target audience and share it. If there are overlaps, you should provide different types of content. - Which (other) websites does she visit?
And what does she find there that she can't find on your page? Analyze her surfing behavior and the pages she visits to adapt to the needs of your persona template. - Which social networks does she use?
Sharing your content and offers on social media is essential for reaching your buyer persona. However, it's not worth trying to intercept Instagrammers on Twitter.
The more detailed your concept of the ideal persona template is, the more structure and insight you will gain for building and designing your brand. A good persona reliably tells you what makes your customers tick.
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Where does the information about your persona template come from?
Creating a persona template is time-consuming, but it saves you time in the long run. Once you know the common patterns among your customers, you can access existing templates at any time. There are basically two ways to get the relevant information you need to sketch your personas: data analysis and surveys.
Persona research through interviews
Survey your existing customers. Send interviews and survey emails to all current and promising new customers in your funnel. You can improve the response rate with a small incentive—vouchers or discounts work wonders.
Ask them what they like about your product or service and where they see room for improvement. And let them tell you what problem or need led them to your offering.
When creating questionnaires like this, don't leave out demographic information and also aim for character-related background information. Formulate questions such as "Which characteristics best describe you?" or "What best defines your industry?".
Aim for three to five rounds of interviews. A single interview will give you little to no insight into trends, overlaps, or patterns in the answers. You need reference and comparative data to obtain reliable information.
For interview series and survey forms, use tools and questions that make evaluation as efficient and easy as possible later on. First, define the most important KPIs you want to analyze and make the surveys available to your customers in various ways (email, social media, etc.).
Persona research with existing data
Data-driven personas are often clearer and more reliable than interview-based ones, because people's answers always reflect their subjective self-perception.
Existing data from your website analytics already allows you to identify isolated trends regarding how people find your content and how they interact with it. This includes referrals and sources, click-through and bounce rates, dwell time, interactions, leads, conversions, etc.
You can gain further insights by looking at your CRM data. Ideally, you will find information about your customers' professional backgrounds, but above all about the type of content that particularly appeals to your customer base.
Your sales department should also have interesting data for your persona. Through their customer contacts, your sales staff should have a good idea of the questions your customers generally have and how they perceive your brand or company.
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Create a persona template from the collected information
Ideally, you will receive equally subjective data from interviews directly with your customers and leads, as well as purely objective data from unbiased analytics insights. From the greatest overlaps that this information yields for the individual KPIs, you can develop a good, clear picture of your ideal customer or customers.
Once you have collected all the data, evaluate it in terms of commonalities. This will give you a good overview of your customer type. A solid persona template will guide you in content creation, product development, and sales measures.
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Your personas should have at least these characteristics
The more detailed and clear your idea of your ideal customer is, the more effective it will be. With a persona template created once, you can check this ideal at any time. Because, of course, people change. A persona must not remain rigid. In addition, a good template can be applied to any product or service. Your sample buyer should definitely be based on these pillars.
1. Basic information
Regardless of whether you have one persona or several personas, each template should start with demographic information. Specify the following data:
- First and last name
- age
- gender
- place of residence
- job title
- marital status
- Number of children
- short biography
- character attributes
Keep this initial data as clear and easy to understand as possible. This step is about creating a snapshot of your ideal customer. A glance at this "resume" should reveal basic information about him or her.
So, first you create an archetype of your typical customer. Based on this information, you can categorize them as "the employee" who has a good job and only surfs the web in their free time, or as "the art student" who represents the young, creative target group.
Example: In our contentbird software , you can easily create personas for your content creation and maintain them on an ongoing basis. For the basic characteristics of a person (in this case, a content manager), it looks like this:
2. Images and photos
Pictures say more than a thousand words. Once personas have faces, they immediately become more human. Find a portrait or full-body shot of a person who most closely resembles your archetypal customer. Websites with stock images are a good place to start.
A specific, human face can help you get an even better idea of the pain points your service or product touches on in this person's life. Find a photo that best matches the information from the resume in the first step and reflects age, gender, and personality as accurately as possible.
3. Personality
Create a character profile of your persona. This can help you figure out who your persona really is and tailor your marketing efforts to them. Are they funny? Sarcastic? Ambitious? Introverted or extroverted? Key points are sufficient here. But you can also use scales to solve the whole thing.
4. Goals and motivation
The aim here is to write down the goals and motivations of your persona that relate to your product or service. If you offer a fitness product, you need customers whose medium-term goal is, for example, to participate in a marathon. Someone who wants to improve their income, on the other hand, is more likely to be attracted to a financial product.
What motivates your personas? What could be a realistic reason for them to take advantage of your offer? By working out their goals, you can answer such questions and explore their pain points.
5. Pain Points
For your marketing to work, the pain points, such as the personality of your target groups, must be related to your offering. What troubles and annoys them, what are they afraid of? How can your product help solve their problems? Based on the fears and frustrations in your persona template, it will be easier for you to suggest solutions to him or her.
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The persona template in a nutshell
Before you start developing a marketing strategy, you need to define your persona. This will help you segment your target audience and develop more effective campaigns. A persona template gives you a better overall understanding of who your customers really are, what they are like, and what they are looking for in your products. At the same time, you can increase your engagement rate.
If you need professional help creating your persona and would like a persona template to fill out, we recommend our free trial. Test our software here and create your first persona today!
