buy, research or think.
With this, you can have a more tailored sales conversation, or marketing messages, with your target audience.
The Buyer Persona also makes it easier to allocate your team’s time and resources and achieve alignment across your organization. For example, you may have one person who is an expert in one area of marketing and another one who looks after technology or sales. You may not have a huge team yet. But when you do have a team, it helps make them more customer-centric, because everybody is referring to the same ‘person’. The exercise helps everybody involved acknowledge that these days, the customer is at the centre of the universe.
A persona helps you learn about the following aspects of your ideal customers at a minimum:
Their challenges
Their goals
Personality traits
Demographics
It helps you to set a strategy that’s aimed at attracting the most valuable visitors, leads, and customers to your business.
Why Buyer Personas Matter
This worksheet that I have developed is what I use with my clients. You can download this, and the other worksheets for this book using the link below.
Download this worksheet and the others you need in this book at academy.growthcoaches.co/worksheets
Grab a print-out, or iPad, and pen, and let’s now go through it together.
A Quick Overview Of The Sections
To start off, we will give the persona a name in the top left. It’s just a name that helps you remember who it is you’re talking about. For this example let’s imagine you are the Chief Marketing Officer of a clothing label. Let’s make something up for our customers and call the persona, ‘Shopper Sarah’ who obviously likes to shop. Now imagine that from now on, everyone within your organisation, from the sales and marketing team to the CEO, refer to your ideal customer as Shopper Sarah. No more terms like “target market” or “audience” which in most contexts is too vague and impersonal. A casual conversation between your teams could sound like this:
Team member 1: Is this a good headline for the campaign ad?
Team member 2: Would shopper Sarah like it? Would shopper Sarah resonate with it?
At this point, without a Buyer Persona, you could go in circles debating to pros and cons of a few words strung together in various combinations. You’ve probably experienced some version of this scenario at some point. Now with a Buyer Persona, you can change that conversation. You could instead ask:
What is typical for Shopper Sarah to say?
How would she read this as a female?
Does it match what Shopper Sarah does at her job?
What’s her job title?
What are some of the responsibilities she has?
Is it in a language that is appropriate to her age?
Does she have children? Are we considering her priorities?
Is she married? How does this relate to her life?
At this point, you may start asking why it is important for you to know the details of her life, when you’re just trying to sell her, say, a new item of clothing from your brand. Why do you need to know whether your buyer has a family, is married or has children? Well, there are two answers to that.
The first, is that you always want to bring your marketing back to the fact that you are selling and helping real-life people. These citizens of planet earth have their own lives and concerns beyond your product. It sounds obvious, be how often we forget that clothing isn’t just about style, but practicality when you‘re a busy parent with a toddler who doesn’t see the difference between a Kleenex and your brand new outfit. Another consideration for instance, could be that one of the genuine concerns of your Buyer Persona might be that they’re time-poor, not just because they work a ton. It could also be because on the weekends, they're busy with their family. Or it may be that after 5:00 PM, it’s the wrong time to communicate with them.
The second reason is that Facebook knows whether your target audience has a family or are married and so on. By mapping out these attributes in your Buyer Personas, it allows us to tell Facebook “Hey Facebook, when you show our ads, please target people with a family or who are married.”
Other aspects of their personality (as you glance around your worksheet you’ll notice) that we need to know about include:
The location. We want to know where in the world they live.
Their goals.
Real things they’ve said (ask your Sales team). We need to know what are some real life quotes that reveal their points of view. It could have been heard in phone calls before they became a customer, or it could be after they’ve become a customer. What are the real things that they’ve actually said?
What are some of their common objections? Some common ones could be “Ah, I’m sorry, it’s too expensive,” “This is out of my budget”, “Maybe later”, “How much?” “How soon can I make this happen?” “What are the steps to making it happen?”
What are their frustrations?
Okay let’s leave the clothing label world for a second and now let’s pretend you sell cleaning products. A buyer’s frustration may not necessarily be that they have no cleaning products. It could be that when people come over to their house, they’re always caught off guard and they need to quickly clean up. They may be frustrated that their work-life balance is out of whack.
So when you’re creating a marketing strategy for these buyers, don’t (as a lawyer might call it) ’lead the witness’. Meaning don’t bake your assumptions about their answers into your question. The conversation should never sound like this:
“So you don’t have any cleaning products, do you? No? Well, funny you should mention that...I happen to sell xyz cleaning products.”
You want to talk to your buyers as real people. They have a family, their kid is a cereal spiller. There’s cereal everywhere all the time. This is a genuine frustration. You know this because you’ve noted that they have a family. When you’re selling to your Buyer Persona, you can recognize the fact they’re time-poor and their home is sometimes out of control. And that’s totally fine.
The next thing you’ll be looking at are the traits, which are the identifying tell-tale signs about your Buyer Persona. Imagine that you are going to a room full of a hundred people. In that room, there are 10 people who are perfect candidates for your product or service.
How would you identify these people?
