Know Your Customer: How to Build Buyer Personas
Javier Ramirez
Liberty University
BUSI 520: Strategic Marketing Management
Muriel Wilson
January 2, 2022
Know Your Customer: How to Build Buyer Personas
How well do you know your ideal customer?
What makes them tick? Or rather, what gets them to click and buy your products?
An informed buyer persona (sometimes called a customer avatar or audience profile) is
an evolving asset that keeps your marketing efforts focused—from your branding to your
social media content to your ad targeting—on your target audience. What was once an
exercise generally practiced by large companies, is increasingly useful for smaller online
retailers.
To maximize your return on investment (ROI) when you invest in paid ads or content, it
helps to have a clear target customer profile. Because if you’re selling to everyone, you’re
selling to no one. That’s where a buyer persona, like the one we’re about to show you how
to build from start to finish, can help you sell more effectively to someone who’s likely to
buy from you.
The benefits of buyer personas
As the internet becomes more crowded over time, marketing is less about making the
most noise and more about saying the right things to the right people at the right time.
Buyer personas offer an easy-to-reference resource for you, your team, and any
external people you work with to be on the same page (in the same book your target
customer reads, so to speak).
A detailed buyer persona allows you to:
Be more intentional with your ad targeting
New customer targeting tools have enabled businesses to run tailored campaigns based
on an ever-growing list of various demographic and psychographic traits.
Paid advertising now allows for an incredible degree of advanced targeting based on
information like location, age, language, education level, and interests, which you can
include, exclude, and layer on top of one another to show ads to a specific audience—even
with a small budget and a new online store.
Prioritize the marketing channels that matter
A common trap in marketing is to try to be everywhere with your brand, spreading
yourself and your resources thin across several channels. When your buyer persona includes
where your target customer spends their time, it’s easier to determine which channels to
focus on and—more important—which channels not to focus on.
Ensure your copywriting, design, and content resonates with your audience
When you know who your audience is, you can write sharper headlines, feature
imagery your customers see themselves in, and produce content they’ll find helpful,
entertaining, or inspiring.
Couple that with the ability to target your audience based on traits like where they live,
what industry they work in, and what type of entertainment they enjoy, and you increase
the chances your brand reaches and resonates with the right people.
Make your team’s communication impactful
The research you do to understand your customer shouldn’t live in a single person’s
head, or be distributed across several lengthy docs. A buyer persona profile consolidates all
the need-to-know information about your target customer into a page or two. You want it
to be useful to everyone in your business—from marketing to support—who has to know
how to sell to your customer.
For example, support teams can now anticipate barriers to purchase like a prerequisite
for using the product or a secondary language that needs to be incorporated to reduce
customer pain points.
Note: Your customer personas will evolve over time
When you’re creating personas for a brand new business, much of your buyer persona
may be based on broad market and industry research supplemented by personal thoughts,
feelings, and hunches. As you learn more, don’t forget to go back and continually refine your
buyer personas with new insights and feedback as you interact with customers over time.
How to Build Buyer Personas
1. Define broad buyer personas
To begin defining your buyer personas, you’ll want to start by being as broad as possible
before drilling down into specifics. Most businesses have multiple buyer personas, so feel
free to separate distinct customer types into their individual profiles.
As an example, let’s start a fictitious online business that sells dog food, called Sally’s
Dog Food.
Because we manufactures our own dog food, we can assume two potential customer
groups from the jump:
1. End customers. People who might buy dog food for their own use.
2. Wholesale accounts. Other businesses that may want to sell our dog food in their
own retail and online stores.
Now that we have two very broad buying groups, let’s break them down further.
Depending on the type of product you’re selling, you may break down your personas
differently. However, in this particular case, we will divide the customer groups into two
distinct personas for each type:
1. Dog owners who want to buy kibble for their canine companion.
2. Veterinarians who stock and sell dog food for their clients.
Now that we have all of our initial buyer personas broadly defined, it’s time to identify
the key details we need about them.
2. Identify useful details about your buyer personas
There are a lot of angles to approach customer research from, but stick to intel you’d
actually use to make business decisions. You don’t need to know their favorite color or what
they order at Starbucks to sell dog food.
Since Facebook is one of the largest ad networks around it has a lot of audience
targeting options that can be mapped one-to-one with your ideal customer profile. This
makes Facebook ads a great place to start looking for customer persona demographics and
psychographics to define.
Here are some of the most common traits included in buyer persona profiles:
Location: Where do they live? Where do they not live?
Age: What is their general age range?
Gender: What is the mostly likely gender of this customer?
Interests: What interests and hobbies are relevant to your product?
Education: What is the education level of this persona? If relevant, what did they
study in school?
Job title: What’s their field of work and what types of job titles do they carry?
Income: What is the income range and purchasing power of this buyer persona?
Relationship status: Are they single or married?
Language: What languages do people in this persona speak?
Favorite websites: What websites related to your products do they frequent?
Buying motivations: What is their primary reason for buying your products?
Buying concerns: What might keep them from buying your products?
Keep in mind you don’t need to answer all of these questions about each of your
personas. You may even opt to answer different questions altogether. The goal is to
understand your customers so you can communicate with them more effectively.
3. Research your buyer personas
Of course, you should populate your buyer persona with informed intel by drawing
upon primary or secondary data and conducting market research, such as interviewing
prospective or current customers.
Data can be a treasure trove of insights about your customers, and the best part of it is
the more customers you have, the better your data becomes. But there is also value in
hearing about your customers’ preferences from your customers themselves.
Here are some great places to look for insights about your ideal customer.
Your own analytics
If you use analytics tools like Shopify Analytics Dashboard or Google Analytics, you can
find really cool metrics and information, like what languages your customers speak, which
browsers they use, how they found your store, their ages and genders, whether they’re
first-time or returning visitors, how often they visit your site, how much time they spend on
it, and even what devices they use.
A marketing plan is a strategic roadmap that businesses use to organize, execute, and
track their marketing strategy over a given period. Marketing plans can include different
marketing strategies for various marketing teams across the company, all working toward
the same business goals.
The purpose of a marketing plan is to write down strategies in an organized manner.
This will help keep you on track and measure the success of your campaigns.
Writing a marketing plan will help you think of each campaign's mission, buyer
personas, budget, tactics, and deliverables. With all of this information in one place, you'll
have an easier time staying on track with a campaign. You’ll also discover what works and
what doesn't. Thus, measuring the success of your strategy.
