A Full Guide to Buyer Persona + [Template]

Buyer personas can help your business develop, evaluate, offer, differentiate your brand from others. It is the foundation that can help you with customer acquisitions, conversion, retention, and engage with your buyers. So let’s start with the basics.

What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is a fictional character representation of your ideal prospect. It is a perfect representation of a perfect customer (fictional) who may or may not exist in real life.

Representing the ideal prospect means combining the most desirable characteristics of a customer. This persona is based on market research and real data about existing customers. Customers have specific demographic and behavioral characteristics and emotional needs and reactions.

The marketing persona reveals insights about buyer’s feelings, concerns, desires, and pains. Besides knowing what your customers need, the persona lets you know what they want and what they don’t want.

How is a buyer persona different from a target audience?

Before buyer personas came around, marketers used target audiences to understand their audience. By creating a persona audience, you provide an overview and a big-picture of who you are targeting.

How would that look like?

Let’s take a case of a growth hacking agency that decides to target personal success coaches. This would mean you want to create a profile of a specific target audience. i.e.

Life coaches. Aged 30-50 who live in Chicago.

If you wanted to create a buyers persona, it would look like this:

‘Notime’ George. Notime George is 45 years old, married, with two children. He lives in Chicago. He owners of a successful coaching business that helps people overcome their psychological barriers to success.

He achieves this through regular seminars held monthly with assistance from his two partners. They generate over $70,000. However, he has been struggling because he is overworked, micromanaged a lot, and costs are rising.

Putting marketing on autopilot will free him a lot. The free time, he can spend it with family and create a more successful seminar.

A target audience describes demographics, while a buyer persona describes behaviors.

At times, framing your target audience can be the first step towards building your marketing persona. What begins as a description of target audience demographics can end up as the profile of your customer avatar.

Creating a custom message to your customer avatar increases the chances of appealing to the target client. It addresses all problems, needs, and desires. The message goes to the heart to the reader and triggers a reaction or no reaction.

What are the benefits of a buyer persona?

Imagine a situation where you are a coach and intend to reach out to potential clients. You could say:

“Everybody could be interested in my seminars/coaching sessions, so I want to be seen by many people as possible.’

Isn’t reaching many people the objective here?

While brand awareness is great, it is not everything. It would be false to assume Big Exposure = More customers. Do not let the mere numeric be a bad measure of your success.

In reality, Good exposure = More Customers.

If you try to speak to everyone, you end up talking to no one.

The best way is to create a message that speaks to an individual customer and not the masses.

 Buyer personal strategy example

• Imagine a market with 1,000,000, and you intend to speak to everyone and advertise the awesome coaching seminar. Chances that you will fail are very high because of a limited budget. Even if you reach say 100,000, you will have a demographic that does not have homogeneous characteristics.

You may only convert 1% of them (1,000) to customers.

• Now decide to work with a specific persona. Assume only 50,000 from the 1,000,000 meet the persona requirements. You will need half the budget to reach them all. After crafting a precise message to the audience, you may get a higher conversion, say about 2%.

You still convert 1,000 customers with half the budget. You can use the other half budget for the next avatar of 1,000 customers.

In the second case, you can target a smaller group and persuade them. A marketing persona narrows down your target market, which allows you to focus them more effectively.

Many behaviors become apparent. You will quickly understand the avatar’s pain, fears, and wishes. With this knowledge, you can solve the customer’s problems. A buyer persona helps in formulates different strategies (marketing, new product design, priorities, etc.)

Keeping your ideal avatar in mind enables you to grow and expand your business. You will also get more clients and more revenues.

How many marketing personas do you need?

This is a good question. The answer is, “it depends.” It depends on the type of business, your budget, and your resources. Think of it qualitatively and not quantitatively. It’s highly recommended that you start with one buyer persona and grow.

You can get more insights into how many personas you should have in this article.

How do you create a buyer persona template?

With the information you have gained, it is time to create your own buyer persona. A buyer persona template is available at the end of this post.

The buyer persona template enables you to have a clear idea of who you are talking to and whom you are trying to sell your products or service to. All information is gathered in one place.

While answering the persona template, answer as if you are the ideal customer you are looking for. This will give you a clear picture of how the customer feels/thinks.

Here is an example of details to capture:

Name:

Gender:

Age:

Marital Status / Children: 0000000000

Location:

Job Title:

Annual Income:

Level of Education:

 

My Goal

I ultimately want to [Insert main Goal] because it will allow me to [Insert #1 major benefit].

If I’m honest with myself, my deepest desire is to [Insert #1 desire]. I can imagine myself.

[Paint the picture of the avatar once they’ve reached their goal].

 

My Struggles

Pain Points

However, I’m currently [pain point #1], and it’s keeping me from being able to [pain point #2].

The reason that is limiting my growth is [insert reason].

I believe [insert myth], and because of this, I can’t seem to make any progress.

 

Obstacles

To reach my goal, I have tried to (failed attempt/obstacle #1) with little success, and this has resulted in [insert pain point].

To reach my goal, I have tried to (failed attempt/obstacle #2) with little success, and this has resulted in [insert pain point].

To reach my goal, I have tried to (failed attempt/obstacle #3) with little success, and this has resulted in [insert pain point].

 

Failed Solutions

I have tried [this] in the past, but it failed because it [what was missing for the service/product].

I have tried [that] in the past, but it failed because it [what was missing for the service/product].

I have tried [this] in the past, but it failed because it [what was missing for the service/product].

 

How the product helps me:

Since I found [insert product/service], I am now able to [Major benefit and secondary benefit].

What I find the most valuable in [insert product/service] is the only product/course/program/system that comes equipped with:

[Unique feature#1], which allows me to [secondary benefit]

[Unique feature#2] …

[Unique feature#X], which allows me to [final benefit]

Conclusion

Whether you are creating a persona for your ebook using our ebook creator or marketing in general, it’s good to create a persona that will resonate with your audience. Try using our persona template to help you map out the best persona for your business.