Build Your Own Buyer Persona (Free Template)

What comes to mind when you think about the elements of a successful marketing campaign? The message might be one of the first things you consider. 

But, how do you nail the messaging for marketing campaigns?

A buyer persona helps you understand the needs of your current and prospective customers. When you know who your target audience is, you can send the right message to the right group of people.

Your target audience isn’t just one audience. It’s a group of people who are interested in your business for different reasons. The ability to send messages that target each of those reasons is critical for creating a successful marketing campaign. 

When you identify your ideal buyers, you can create effective, targeted messages that produce conversions across your marketing efforts.

A buyer persona is a fictional person who represents a company’s ideal customer, based on actual customer data or extensive market research. These personas can help you understand the needs of each audience segment you serve, and get the right message in front of the right group of people.

Think about each product or service you offer and the type of person who would be a good fit for each one. Have them in mind yet? Great! The characteristics of these people, who they are, where they live or work, and their lifestyle and habits, represent your ideal buyer personas.

A buyer persona is important because it helps you get to know your audience. That understanding will steer your marketing in the right direction to help you connect with your target market. 

Your messaging, sales materials, and overall strategy should all be outcomes of creating a buyer persona because it will allow you to speak directly to their interests, goals, and problems. 

When you can align the right product with the right person, that’s where the magic of marketing truly happens.

The buyer persona is a great resource to help:

• Determine your compelling message. You have a product or service that offers great benefits. You’re passionate about it and want to shout it from the rooftops! Your marketing message should show that you’re confident in what you can deliver and make people feel excited—so much so that it makes them take immediate action. 
• Share customer testimonials. To help illustrate these compelling benefits, offer an example or two of how you’ve delighted other customers and the results they’ve experienced.
• Discover the most relevant marketing channel. When considering successful marketing campaign elements, think about the delivery method. You’ve crafted an amazing message and now it’s time to get it out into the world on the most relevant channel.
• Organize previous marketing campaign performance data. Start with what you know about your audience and what has worked well in the past. If you’ve had consistent success launching your campaigns through a particular channel, whether it’s email, online advertising, social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter, or even snail mail, leverage what works.
• Understand your audience's preferred communication. This is one of the most overlooked steps in the process of planning a marketing campaign, but it’s certainly the most important. Think about your target audience and where you can reach them most effectively. Where are people most actively engaging with you? 

When you create a buyer persona you want to have a good understanding of what product or service will be the single focus of your marketing campaign. This will be the primary solution which focuses on the needs of your persona. Then you can create messaging that highlights those needs. 

Here’s how to create a buyer persona:

• Provide a memorable persona name and refer to them as a real person
• Use customer data to identify the key demographics of your persona
• Describe your buyer’s interests, skills, behaviors, and overall lifestyle
• Determine what problems and daily challenges your persona faces
• Figure out what would make your buyer uncertain about purchasing
• Decide what will drive your ideal buyer to make a purchase
• Understand the primary goal or end result your buyer is trying to achieve

You did all the research and pulled together all the data for your target buyer personas, but how do you use it? And how might this determine the different marketing channels you should use for your marketing campaigns?

Let’s say in your research you discovered that your current and prospective customers are between the ages of 18 and 24. Then you would likely want to message on social media using specifically Instagram and Snapchat to reach them. 

But if your research showed that your target market is between the ages of 30 and 49 you might want to focus your marketing efforts on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Some other information your buyer persona will help you with are:

• What improvements you should make to your product or service
• How you should be messaging the benefits of your product or service
• What channels you should be using to reach your ideal customer
• How to overcome objections or concerns your buyers might have prior to purchasing
• Why someone would need or want your offering