A buyer persona is basically a characterization of your company’s perfect customer. It represents a compilation of many of the features you find across the board within your target demographic. You should have a few different ones. You want to identify a specific buyer type when it comes to men, women, different age groups, and individuals who fall into different financial brackets.

Start With the Basics

Build a basic profile that includes general information such as age, gender, and location. Choose industry-related information that includes types of employment, yearly income, and a more defined age group. By starting with the most basic information, you can build a persona in one of many different directions. This allows you to be more diverse when creating campaign strategies.

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Examine Current Customer Profiles

The best source of information is in your current customer files. By taking the best parts of each customer profile, you can create the perfect persona, the fictional person you can cater to whenever you are trying to plan or create a new marketing campaign. Go through your customer profiles and identify the qualities and characteristics that keep showing up across the board. Combining those into one persona will embody the target audience you are looking to reach.

Survey Current Customers and Referrals

Use surveys to collect information from existing customers as well as people who are referred to you. You can also include surveys on your website for individuals who are curious about your company. The information you collect will help point you toward both the positive and negative characteristics that will influence your persona’s decision to buy. Surveys may also point to new trends when it comes to finding out what your current employees will be looking for in the future.

Identify Potential Barriers and Issues

To make your persona as accurate as possible, you need to identify the negatives as well as the positives. The barriers and challenges you find will provide you with insight on how your products should be improved. Knowing what turns a customer off is the first step in avoiding the triggers that will eventually drive them in the opposite direction. It will also tell you if the negatives are associated with one aspect of the persona, such as age or gender. 

Include Both Positive and Negative

Find a happy medium. When building your ideal persona, balance the positive with the negative so you know exactly where to focus your branding and campaign resources. If you are looking to create multiple personas, make sure to make each one a unique combination so that you will be able to produce a quality campaign that is directed toward that particular demographic.

The buying persona or personas that you create will help you strengthen your advertising and marketing campaigns so that you get the most bang for your buck. Your personas are basically a cross-section sampling of your current and potential clients. Update them often and refer back to them whenever you see a change in marketing trends. They will hold the clues you need to remain attractive to your target demographic. 

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