Buyer Persona 101: Tips and Examples to Create Yours
By Ankit Vora
In the eight years of my marketing career, I’ve always believed that good marketing ultimately boils down to how well you know your buyers.
For me, creating buyer personas has been key to truly understanding the person on the other side of the screen. These fictional profiles have helped me understand what makes my buyers tick, what keeps them up at night, and what they need to succeed.
But creating buyer personas isn’t a game of guesswork. You need a strong strategy to make accurate and nuanced personas.
In this article, I’ll share my framework with examples to help you create yours. I’ll cover:
Why Buyer Personas Are Essential to Your Business Growth
An Actionable Playbook on How to Create Buyer Personas
5 Buyer Persona Examples to Inspire Yours
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona, also called a customer persona, is a fictional profile of your ideal customer designed with on-the-ground market research. It helps you understand your buyers’ demographics, pain points, motivations, expectations, and constraints.
Over the last few years, I’ve helped several B2B SaaS companies launch strategic marketing campaigns, and if there’s one important thing I’ve learned, it’s this:
You have to really understand your buyers and speak their language to make any real impact.
Another important point to note is that there’s no one specific type of buyer. It’s important to conduct thorough audience research and build multiple buyer personas, each representing one segment of your overall target customers.
Every segment will have varying priorities, goals, challenges, and even demographics.
Jake Victor, a copywriter and growth strategist, echoes my thoughts by explaining how persona-focused marketing makes people feel “this is for me.”
When you know exactly what motivates buyers, you can use these insights to:
- Come up with relatable campaigns to stress buyers’ pain points.
- Create compelling copy and content that makes them feel heard and seen.
- Design user experiences tailored to specific aspirations and challenges.
So, I’m sharing my learnings from creating realistic buyer personas and some great examples I’ve used as inspiration.
Before I show you how to create buyer personas, let’s dive deeper into why they’re really important.
Why Buyer Personas Are Essential to Your Business Growth
Back when I was a newbie, I heard the term ‘buyer personas’ thrown around a lot. I was curious to learn why exactly good marketers were obsessed with designing buyer personas.
In the process of learning more about these personas, I realized that, traditionally, brands created marketing personas to personalize campaigns for buyers in each buyer. Today, these fictional profiles serve a bigger purpose than that.
Here are three main reasons why you need buyer personas for your business.
1. You can define the brand positioning.
When you know your buyers’ biggest pain points and challenges, you can position yourself as an ideal solution for specific problems.
Source:: HubSpot Blog
