What is a buyer persona and how do you build one?
An accurate buyer persona stops you from wasting thousands of dollars on ads that don’t convert.
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When startups think about going to market, promotion plays a big role in the equation. But with consumers being exposed to over 5,000 ads a day, it’s essential to cut through the noise and stand out as a relevant, new product.
Whether you’re selling a new voice assistant or a SaaS app that helps HR hire faster, the key to your startup’s success is building a product that solves a specific problem for a specific customer.
That specific customer is your “buyer persona” — an important marketing concept to master. Buyer personas — those who pay the invoice — are sometimes different from user personas, who use your product.
This article will explain what buyer personas are, why they’re essential to your success, and how to build better customer profiles.
Let’s dive in.
What’s a buyer persona template, and why do you need one?
A buyer persona profile or template is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research. It includes their feelings, behaviors, experiences, demographics, pain points, and goals.
As the Buyer Persona Institute puts it:
"A buyer persona tells you what your potential customer is thinking and doing as they weigh their options to address a problem that you solve. [It involves] the specific attitudes, concerns, and criteria that drive prospective customers to choose you, your competitor, or the status quo.”
But why do you need a buyer persona profile at all? Let me explain this with an example:
When you’re buying your best friend a birthday gift, you’re drawing on many years of friendship to help you pick the right one. You’ve spent time with them, shared memories with them, and chatted about their hopes and dreams. This context makes it easier to pick something they’ll love and cherish.
As a founder working to market your product, you don’t have that luxury. You’re selling a product to thousands (or even millions) of customers, and you simply don’t have the time or resources to get to know all of them that closely.
This is where buyer personas come in. With buyer personas, you’re condensing all your customers into several accurate representations of real people that guide the rest of your marketing efforts.
But how does a buyer persona template help you?
A buyer persona template isn’t just some fancy infographic to stick on the wall. It has big benefits for your marketing campaign — and the more accurate your personas are, the greater the benefits. Here are 3 key benefits:
#1 Your buyer persona profile helps you understand what your customer is going through
Buyer personas provide humanizing context about your audience. They answer questions like “Who is this person? What kind of experiences do they care about? What matters to them at home and work?”
See, your ideal customer is usually worried about the problem, the solution, all the different options, and whether any of them will actually help them achieve their goals. So you may or may not feature in their decision to buy a solution for their problem, not to talk of your solution.
Understanding these complex aspects of their buying behavior is crucial because...
#2 Your buyer persona profile helps you say the right things
Messaging is a big aspect of your marketing strategy — especially as an early-stage founder looking for traction. Across every channel of your marketing campaign, you need to say the right things that will resonate with your buyer.
"A customer persona helps you say the right things to the right people in the right way and at the right time."
Because you’re talking to a representation of your ideal customer, you can be sure that every word on your landing page, email campaign, and social media channels is exactly what they want to hear. This is super important because it affects the next point, which is...
#3 Your buyer persona template prevents you from wasting money
If you’ve spent hundreds of dollars on a Facebook ad campaign that barely converted any customers, you’ve already experienced the results of advertising to the wrong persona.
Consumers across social media, search engines, and online forums are bombarded with hundreds of messages every day from companies that want to sell to them. Only a few manage to cut through the noise. If you don’t have your persona down pat, you’ll end up launching a weak marketing campaign to the wrong target audience.
Facebook and Google may let you choose the exact kind of customer you want to show your ads to — right down to the sort of cell phone they use — but they still won’t tell you who your ideal customer is. That’s something you’ll need to figure out before launching any marketing.
There are also real consequences to marketing to the wrong target persona. For example, Facebook has an Ad Quality metric that scores the relevance of your ad based on how people are engaging with it.
The lower your score, the higher your cost-per-metric — whether that’s clicks, views, app installs, etc. The algorithm senses that your message isn’t resonating, so it has to work harder to show people your ad and get them to engage with it. The result? You spend more money to reach fewer people.
The opposite is also true. When your messaging resonates — when people are liking, sharing, commenting, and clicking through — it makes the algorithm’s job easier, and you end up reaching more people for the same amount. This results in a higher ROI for each dollar spent.
But saving money isn’t all there is to it, because...
#4 Your buyer persona research helps you build the right features
Product development costs time and money. Depending on your project’s size, you might need to hire developers, invest in a decent tech stack, and sink hours into building your MVP or adding new features.
But what if nobody wants what you’re building?
A buyer persona prevents that from happening. When you have a solid persona, you can align your product roadmap to your buyer’s needs and what they’d pay for.
In short, an accurate buyer persona helps you build the right features, nail your messaging, and spend less money getting the word out.
Let’s look at a buyer persona example
Sara Newton is a 31-year-old technical lead at Zoosk, the online dating service. Sara writes and deploys new features regularly, and she’s especially big on product quality and testing.
On a typical day, she uses tools like JIRA, Github, and Slack to manage her work and collaborate with the product managers and designers on her team. She prioritizes fast feedback and being able to triage issues quickly.
Her biggest pain points? Working with slow or non-existent feedback or hearing about issues from customer support or paying customers. This would mean she has failed at her job as a proactive, test-driven, and quality-focused software developer.
Now, suppose you work for Cypress, a product testing software company. Such an understanding of “Sara” would help you to target her with the right messaging. For instance, it’s clear that Sara values being on top of product issues before they go public as well as the ability to quickly ship new solutions.
Here are some examples of landing page hero text that would resonate with Sara:
Test it. Ship it. Fast.
Test early. Test often.
Find and fix faults twice as fast.
Test and deploy with confidence.
Test and ship bug-free apps quickly.
Discover and fix bugs before you ship.
Smarter testing for quality-obsessed developers.
We make your software bulletproof before you ship it.
The fastest way to automate manual testing workflows.
And here are some social media post examples that’d catch Sara’s eye:
“With Cypress, you can test throughput and generate detailed reports in minutes. Cypress ensures a stress-free and bug-free release by highlighting critical issues in your code.”
“Cypress helps technical leads find the right solution quickly. Our platform is easy to use and allows your team to create and ship bug-free software.”
In each case, Cypress touches on a specific pain point, behavior, or concern that their ideal customer would be experiencing at different points along her customer journey.
There’s just one question, though:
Should you have different buyer personas?
Short answer: it depends on who you’re targeting.
Your business may be offering products and services to more than one audience segment and will need to work on separate positioning and messaging for each.
Different buyer personas are especially common in marketplace products where the vendors and the buyers have different (and sometimes even competing) needs.
Take Uber, for example. Uber caters to two distinct segments: drivers and riders. Each segment has different behaviors, goals, objectives, and pain points that need to be addressed, so one persona would be wildly insufficient.
In short, build as many different personas as you need — but take care not to hamper your focus with too many of them.
How to build the perfect buyer persona profile
You know you need a buyer persona, but how do you go about building one?
There’s a specific framework you can follow that makes the process easier, and that’s what we’ll look at in this section.
Technically, your buyer persona is the second step towards understanding your customers’ motivations and pain points. The first step is to build what’s called a “proto-persona.”
A proto-persona is what you think about your buyers and their behaviors. In other words, you assume stuff about them — based on preliminary data — that you’ll then confirm later against real-world data.
Building a detailed buyer persona enables you to understand your customers deeply. There are 5 main ways of collecting the data you need to build a buyer persona (or to confirm a proto-persona).
Your buyer persona research can make use of:
Surveys and interviews
Focus groups
Discovery calls
Customer support
Your website
#1 Surveys and interviews
The best way to build accurate buyer personas is by talking to your existing customers. Surveys and interviews are two ways of uncovering the thoughts, behaviors, and pain points of your customers.
To get maximum engagement, you can offer a small prize for participating. This can be anything from Amazon vouchers and payment discounts to extra entries in your next competition.
#2 Focus groups
Focus groups are interviews at scale. Here, you gather many current customers (or prospective customers) and ask them the same questions you’d ask in a one-on-one interview.
The same rules of appreciation apply - offer your audience a small token of gratitude in exchange for their valuable time and information.
#3 Discovery calls
Discovery or demo calls are a great opportunity to unearth what kinds of problems your prospective customer deals with daily. The low-commitment nature of discovery calls also works in your favor. You’re not necessarily selling them anything; you simply want to understand what they’re struggling with.
These short pre-purchase calls typically contain insights that you can use to better understand your prospective customer’s motivations and improve your offer.
#4 Customer support
What better way to uncover new pain points than to speak to the customer support department? Even if you’re a solopreneur, you can track what issues bug your buyers the most by analyzing the kinds of tickets that keep being logged.
While the information might not give much insight into their latent behaviors, it can help you understand which aspects of your product are meeting (or not meeting) their needs — and how to improve them.
#5 Your website
If you have a strong content marketing and analytics strategy in place, your website can provide you with multiple data points on who your audience is and what solutions they seek to their problems.
As part of your buyer persona research, note the pages your users visit, the content they scroll down on, and the resources they view or download to get an idea of what problems they might be struggling with.
If you have a conversational marketing strategy in place (say, using chatbots on your website), you can kick off conversations to get their reasons for visiting your site and find out how you can help them achieve their goals.
Once you’ve collected all this data, you can start building your customer profiles. There are 7 main sections of every detailed buyer persona, and we’ll run through each one next.
Overview: Shown first but written last, the overview condenses the rest of the information into a short and sweet paragraph about the buyer’s behaviors, needs, pain points, fears, and aspirations.
Demographic: This section describes your target customer’s attributes such as age, gender, ethnicity, mobility, disabilities, and employment status.
Challenges or pain points: Here, you outline the main problems your customer wants to solve in their daily lives. To a recruiting lead, for example, a pain point could be registering and onboarding remote workers due to the complexity of laws in different regions.
Biggest fears: Fears of something going wrong typically follow pain points. These fears need to be addressed in all your messaging before your buyer can trust that you are the right solution to their problems. In our example above, the hiring lead might be afraid of poor onboarding that sets a new hire up for failure.
Goals and motivations: On the opposite side of fear is hope, and your buyer usually has hidden goals they hope to achieve by solving their problems. For example, our hiring lead may expect to double headcount by the end of the year, motivated by the need to expand capacity before a new fundraising round. You can address your messaging goals and motivations to assure your buyer that you deeply understand what drives them.
Hobbies: Humans are multi-faceted creatures, and hobbies are a large part of their lives. What does your buyer enjoy doing outside their day job? How would your product free up more time for them to enjoy their favorite pastimes?
Career: For most people, their jobs are a huge chunk of their identity, and this aspect could be directly relevant to your product. Understanding your buyer’s career helps you position your product as something that helps them do their jobs better, enjoy their jobs more, or advance further and faster.
Wrap up
Developing personas requires a willingness to understand what makes your buyer tick. However, this process significantly affects how well you can position your product in your buyer’s mind.
Accurate buyer personas make your messaging that much more effective, reducing your customer acquisition costs and boosting ROI by a healthy margin. Showing that you understand your target audience makes it easier for your message — and your offer — to spread across different channels, both offline and online.
You can carry out buyer persona research using interviews, surveys, focus groups, discovery calls, and insights from your customer support team. You can also analyze data from your website and email campaigns to get indirect signals about what your prospects want.
To learn more about how to build the ultimate buyer persona for your business, get our Playbook today and join a community of other founders building the startups of the future.
