Build marketing strategies by creating detailed buyer personas tailored to your target audience. Learn how to humanize your customer profiles, define key demographic and professional attributes, and uncover motivations and challenges that drive purchasing decisions.
Key Insights
- Creating a buyer persona involves assigning a name, avatar, and demographic details such as age, education, and job title to humanize the target audience and make marketing efforts more relatable.
- Organizations often need multiple personas to address different segments effectively; these should be prioritized based on factors like cost-efficiency, accessibility, and alignment with business goals.
- Explore how to gather specific information, such as job responsibilities, performance metrics, goals, challenges, tools used, and preferred communication channels, to build a comprehensive persona, as demonstrated through the example of "Pete the Project Manager."
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So, let us look at the tool. Right, make my persona, buy a persona generator. So, let's get started.
Okay, so create a buyer persona that your entire company can use to market, sell, and serve better. Right, the more they know, the better they'll be at any of those approaches. Then you click build my persona.
So, the first thing I'm going to ask you to do is create an avatar. Why is this step important? You want to choose, well, actually, the very first thing is a name. Right, the name and then the image as the avatar.
So, you choose a name to humanize your buyer persona. Right, sometimes it's called the customer persona or buyer persona. Right, and the name and the avatar you select will help you start thinking about this persona like a real person.
So, that's why we do it. We can keep this information in a chart or some other, you know, format, but this sort of brings the information to life. Right, embodies it.
So, I want to go with: now, one other consideration is that it is very rare for a company to have only one persona. Right, you might have multiple personas, different targeted audiences that you have for your brand. Why do you need more than one persona? Because as soon as you get to the point where you need to talk to that particular segment of consumers differently than another segment, because they have different wants, different concerns, there are different propositions that are valuable to them as opposed to a different consumer group.
You don't want to be focused on the wants, needs, and solutions for a singular group in your messaging, in your marketing campaigns. Right, so once you have to start conveying multiple messages, then it can no longer be in one campaign. You need to create another persona and another campaign targeted at that persona.
Right, and what you need to also do is prioritize your personas. You may have four or five personas that you can potentially reach or provide solutions for, but which ones are going to provide the greatest economic advantage or other advantages to marketing to that persona? Maybe it's easier to reach those customers, or you can reach them more cost-effectively. For these factors and others, you will prioritize them.
Right, and you know, maybe focus on one at a time or, you know, if you're because your marketing budget might be limited to that, but if your budget permits, then you can have simultaneous campaigns in the marketplace going to different buyer personas. So we're going to start building one buyer persona, and I'm coming from the standpoint of Asana, and I'm going to say I'll go with Pete, the project planner. We'll say Pete.
We'll see that his job is project planning. Right, and then, you know, one of the tips is that just so it's easier to remember, give, if the case, a business persona. Give them the same, you know, initial letter as the occupation.
So Pete, the project manager. Mary, the marketing manager. Cynthia, the coder, whatever.
Right, now you pick a persona. Now, is gender important? It may or may not be. Right, now in many cases, gender is a factor, a large factor.
You're primarily marketing to one gender or the other. In other cases, it's not necessarily that you're only marketing to one gender, but you're making a determination that most people within this group are this gender. In some cases, it won't matter at all.
So clearly, there are project managers that are women, but as you will see, marketing someone in a manufacturing environment, and manufacturing environment tends to have more males than women as an industry in that particular profession. So whatever your research shows you regarding the gender or other factors within the industry, that's what's going to inform your decision. For the sake of argument, I'm going with Pete, a male, and he is, I'll say, 25 to 34 years old.
Now, again, there are project managers who are older, younger, et cetera, but you want to find the age group that most closely matches your targeted audience. Less than a high school diploma, you can say what degree, you know, what level of education they have. I'm going to say a bachelor's degree, right? Again, some may have more, some may have less, but that is where most of the targeted audience is, right? Select the industry.
I'm going to say manufacturing. What's the size of the organization? We'll say this, right? Now, why is this important? Well, there are different requirements for marketing to small organizations as opposed to large organizations. If the specific process is a request for a proposal will be on a preferred vendor list first before you can even sell into that company.
If the company is too small, they may not be able to afford your service, right? Because small companies generally mean lower levels of revenue, of budget, right? You know, so the larger you get, the more barriers, the bigger the budget, but the more barriers and layers of decision-making you have to wade through. So you have to find the right size for your particular product or service. I'm saying that we're hypothetically saying there are 200 to 500 employees, right? What is their job title? They are a project manager.
That's why they are Pete, the project manager, right? How is their job measured? Again, this is research, we'll let you know, you know, this understanding, hopefully get interviewed to focus groups with members of this, you know, with this occupation, you get this information, right? How is their job measured? We'll say T productivity, budget, efficiency, right? And we'll say time efficiency. So essentially, whatever word you want to use, they have to come in under budget and on time. And that is his chief, those are his chief objectives.
That's how his job is measured, right? Who does he report to? He reports to the vice president of operations, let's say, right? And maybe in some cases, it might be in some organizations, you report to the, you know, a different title that's similar. So you would list all the titles that are relevant, right? What are their goals or objectives, right? So the goals or objectives are to, you know, to become more efficient, you know, coming under budget, there might be a personal goal, advance in their career, right? So these are some of the things that are important to them, the things they need to do well at their job, they wanted to survive and then thrive, and the things that they, you know, need to do well, thrive at in order to be, you know, to advance, right? So you can begin to understand what drives this, the members of this audience, what's important to them, what they're focusing on. So what are their biggest challenges? Now, these are their pain points, what's preventing them from becoming more efficient, coming in under budget, becoming, you know, whatever goals you put in, well, maybe it's communication, you know, sometimes with a broad team in different parts of the world or different time zones, it's hard to coordinate all that.
Project management disorganization, right? Resources, right? You can even add one, you know, lowered budgets, right? You know, working, trying to do the same job with a lower budget or something along those lines, right? You can always add one. What are their job responsibilities? You know, it's like people management, project management, so forth and so on, right? Now we'll get, so that is now something, you know, understanding something more of the internal, well, includes the internal aspects of your consumer, you know, your targeted audience, their goals, objectives, their biggest challenges, right? And then again, some more understanding about the responsibilities, what's important to them. Now, what tools do they need to use, what tools do they use, or need to do their job? So we'll say they need, they don't need content management, it's just more marketing, right? But they do need cloud-based storage and file-sharing applications.
They need word processing, you know, they need employee scheduling perhaps, project management, email, right? They're doing some invoices, right? So you would include what's relevant, and add any if you need. How do they prefer to communicate with vendors and other businesses? Okay, so they like phone and email, not so much text, maybe they like LinkedIn, right? And how do they gain information about their job? They read industry blogs, they go to company training, they sign up for online courses like this course, right? Now, we'll talk about why all these things factor in, but what social networks do they belong to? Okay, they're on Instagram, they're a little young for Facebook, they're on X, they're on LinkedIn, and they're not on Pinterest, right?
