Buyer personas are detailed representations of your ideal customer based on data, research, and insights. To create buyer personas, you must analyze demographics, behavior patterns, goals, and pain points. This helps refine product development, marketing strategies, sales approaches, and customer support. Furthermore, by segmenting customers and gathering insights from surveys, analytics, and social listening, brands can develop accurate buyer personas to better serve their audience.

These ideal buyer personas are quite difficult to identify, so at Ziken Labs, we want to help outline the best practices and mistakes to avoid in order to get to the best buyer persona possible. 

So, let’s dig a little deeper and define what a buyer persona is in more detail. 

What is a buyer persona?

As we said before, this is your ideal customer, which you and your team designed using all the data you have at your disposal. And this is of paramount importance. 

As we will describe later, a buyer persona is not made just by some demographics, like the one that you find in the settings of your social media business suite. 

It’s a complex character, and you create it using all the data at your disposal. And we do mean all, like purchasing habits, values, pain points, etc. 

A well-done buyer persona should depict your customers, their needs, the things they hold most valuable, and even their desires and fears. 

It should inform every decision you make in your daily business life, from the features you put into your products to the way you set and manage your post-sales process. 

Every brand needs one or more, according to the type of products or services that they commercialize. 

Why you need it

First off, you need to have a clear picture of your target audience, their needs, what they want, etc. 

The more details you put into your buyer persona(e), the better you can design your product or service to meet their needs and desires. It’s fundamental for product adjustment and improvement, as well as for designing new products. 

Furthermore, you will be able to focus your marketing efforts on the right channels, which will result in more ideal prospects being reached and less money wasted where there is no ROI. 

Your sales process will be tailored to your buyer persona, allowing you to know where and how your ideal customer preferably buys things. 

And numbers tend to confirm what we have just written. Look at these stats we took from Marketing Insider Group:

• 56% of companies increase their quality leads using buyer personas
• companies who exceed lead and revenue goals are four times as likely to use buyer personas
• 36% of companies have created shorter sales cycles using buyer personas (this means more money, btw)

Let’s see what you can do to create your perfect buyer persona(e), shall we? 

The fundamental steps to creating a buyer persona

Ok, before we explain, the filters used to set your ad campaign on your social media are not enough. Still, demographics are absolutely a data set to use, together with others. 

And the first step, you guessed it, is exactly that: data.

The first step: Gather data

You need all the data available to you, even though some of it might be useless.

To gather data, you can use any existing clients’ database, whether it is from your sales department or your customer service department. 

Age, sex, what they bought, the problems they complained about, and the place they live in are all valuable.

Other important data can be obtained by looking at your website analytics. Look at the most read blog entries (you do have a blog, right? RIGHT?!?) and the pages that have the most views. This will give you a decently precise idea about your prospects’ pain points and desires.

Social listening is another extremely valuable source of data that allows you to extract some important information from your potential customers’ use and behavior on the social media they use more. There are some software programs that can help you with this by tracking comments, most used words, etc.

Last but not least, actually quite the opposite, you should interview real people, starting from your clients and customers. People who have already bought you and your brand are hands down the best source of info you can find. They are your buyer personas in real life, and they can answer all the questions you need to create one. 

On this one, you should ask your clients or customers to answer some questions every time they buy your product or service and every time they use your customer care or post-sales to report a problem. These are both the ultimate source of reliable information. 

In general, you have to look for patterns. Anything that repeats itself in your customers or clients is a characteristic that can become part of your buying persona.

Here is a simple list of questions that you can ask yourself, your team, or your buyers to help collect some information. 

• what is important to our customer 
• what is the process they go through to buy our product or service 
• what are the fears they need to overcome before buying 
• what internal need does our product or service resonate with and fulfill 
• what would be a deal breaker
• are they married 
• do they have children
• does family have anything to do with the purchase they made by us

Step 2: Divide your buyer personas into macro groups

This is called segmentation. It is necessary in various cases, for example, if you have more than a product or service or if you have clients that are vastly diversified. 

In the first case, it can help to target the specific prospect for that specific product or service. 

Second, it will help you diversify your marketing and make it more incisive so that it speaks to the needs of that particular buyer. 

You can segment your customers according to different criteria, like:

• demographics (age, sex, etc)
• interests and hobbies
• lifestyle 
• values 
• buying behavior and preferences (online or offline, for example) 
• how did they connect with your brand, be it on social media, through a landing page, your newsletter, or a link in your blog? (Again, you have a blog, right? I hope you do.)

There is actually no limit to the type of segmentation or the criteria you use to do it. It must make sense for your brand and for the customer base you have. 

Step 3: Assemble your buyer personas 

Below, you will find some indications and criteria you can use to highlight your buyer persona. They are a good starting point, but feel free to add more. The more the details, the better it is! 

• age, it should be precise, like 46 years 
• sex
• professional occupation, also precise, like copywriter 
• values, like conservative, liberal, environmentalist, etc. 
• what the person likes and what they dislike, both of your brand and about life in general 
• why they are choosing you and not a competitor 
• how they bought your product or service 
• are they repeat clients or customers? 
• …

Step 4: Time to put all this to use 

Now that you have designed your buyer persona(e), you must put them to use. The first thing to do is to check your product against their needs. Is it a perfect match, or did they buy it just because there was no better option? 

In the latter case, it would be important to think of ways to improve your product so that it better meets the requirements of your client base. 

Then, you must target your marketing efforts on the channels that will perform, avoiding or focusing less on those that will not. For example, if your buyer persona does not use social media to buy things, it is perfectly useless to spend money on ads. You will get some revenue, maybe, but it might not be worth the money you spend. 

Maybe your buyer personas are avid reader of your blog (shall we ask it again?), so in this case, an SEO marketing strategy is something you definitely must spend a budget on.

There are countless examples we can make, but we think we made our point clear here. 

Now to sales. Is your ideal customer a conservative who likes to buy things in a shop or a young person who buys everything online? Act accordingly and strategize your sales, adapting them to the buying behavior of your clients. 

Finally, the customer care. Do your clients agree with soulless chatbots and detailed FAQs, or do they prefer to hear a human voice and vent their occasional frustration by shouting insults at it? Human customer experience is expensive, much more than automatic systems, but it can make a big difference if your client base does not find what they want when they need it. 

And do not underestimate the importance of the post-sale experience. It’s as important as the product, so much so that marketing strategies nowadays include it more and more often. 

Mistakes to avoid

A guide of dos would not be complete without some caveats on the don’ts. They are pretty straightforward, actually, and you could just infer them alone, putting all the steps into the negative form.

But we want to help you a bit further, so here we go!

Incomplete or insufficient info 

It’s self-explanatory, if you do not gather enough info on your perfect customer, you are up for some trouble. At the very least, your buyer personas will be inexact, but it could be worse. 

We understand that companies and brands that have just started might have little to no data on customers, for example. In this case, the solution is to ask people who have bought a product or service similar to yours. 

Do you sell clothes? Go to a shop where they sell clothes that are in the same market segment as yours and ask customers. Or do exceptional work of social listening on the accounts, pages, and groups where the topic is discussed. 

Useless info 

Some of the info you collect through the various channels might be useless. This should not be put in your buyer persona. For example, if you have e-commerce and your client base buys your stuff online only, it is probably pretty useless to segment your buyers according to their nationality or geographical region. 

If you sell products for newborn kids, you will not need to know if your buyer-parent has a dog or likes riding a bike since it is unlikely that these two pieces of info have any influence on the choice of their baby’s clothes. 

Old info 

You must update the information on which you depict your buyer personas every now and then, with regularity. The market has changed very fast, especially in the last two decades. Things come and go out of fashion in months. You must be ahead of the curve, lest you want to find yourself knocked down with no idea of what hit you. 

Biased info 

It is our experience that brands often fall in love with themselves or the processes they implement to sell, market, etc. “We’ve always done it that way, why should we change it?”. This and other prejudices can be very dangerous to the health of your company, and you must not enter the process of designing buyer personas.

You must look at actual data and not allow your “gut feeling” to dictate how to proceed. Gut feeling is a good thing, it has allowed humans to survive for tens of thousands of years. But in sales and marketing, rationality prevails. 

You might get it right once or twice, but in the long run, you will lose to your competitors whose buyers are designed using real data. 

Only numbers 

We confirm what we said about the rational approach. But this should not suggest that you can leave emotions outside of the picture. The emotions you use must be your customer’s, not yours. 

Numbers do not tell the whole story. Age, for example, only tells you that that person has lived till a certain moment, but it does not tell you if they care about the environment for their grandchildren or do not give a damn for their personal reasons. 

So, use emotions, not only yours. 

Absence of strategy 

Once you have your buyer personas, you must do the extra work to develop a strategy and the tools to reach and sell to them. 

For example, let’s say that your buyer is a reader of your newsletter, has a high education, is quite interested in politics, and is conservative. You will have to find the most effective copywriting strategies and tone of voice that this type of person uses for the newsletter that they read. You will have to design your website according to the expectations of your buyer. You will also have to provide adequate customer service in order to satisfy their needs.

But all this must happen before the person even buys from you! 

Final considearations on buyer personas

Highlighting buyer personas is of paramount importance for your brand. It will allow you to focus your resources where it matters, save money, avoid losing strategies, and, most importantly, better serve your customer or client. 

It is a tool you can use to design and improve your product, to market it better and more efficiently, to cut the duration of the sales process, and to make your post-sales phase more satisfactory to your buyers. 

It must be detailed and precise. Creating a buyer persona takes a lot of effort, but it is definitely worth it and pays dividends. 

As usual, if you need help with that, you can contact us, and we will help you.