How to Build a Buyer Persona

It is a fact: working on your online presence without creating your buyer personas is no longer an option.

Your audience wants to feel special and unique – and you can only achieve this (or simulate this feeling) in your communication by addressing each person directly, speaking about their desires and pains, at the right times and places, and with the most suitable tone.

And this is possible when you create a buyer persona.

A well-crafted buyer persona allows you to personalize your communication, humanizing the main target segments of your customer base.

This is because it is easier to reach your audience if you think of them as real individuals – rather than a generic audience as a whole.

In this article, you will learn how to build a buyer persona through these topics:

• To build your Buyer Persona, start by knowing your audience in detail
• Create your buyer persona
• Review regularly when needed

But first, you need to know:

What is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer.

What does this exactly mean?

In a nutshell, the buyer persona personifies (yes, it’s redundant) your audience.

Why is it easier to communicate with Joana, a 26-year-old who enjoys canoeing but struggles to find the perfect equipment, rather than with Young Adults, aged between 23 and 30, interested in water sports?

By creating your buyer persona, you are giving a familiar face to your audience.

And in this creation, various information should be included, from name, age, or occupation, to desires, fears, sources of information, and others.

The best part? You can create several personas if you wish. The ideal number will depend on the size and diversity of your audience. Here, the choice always depends on this analysis – especially, to understand how necessary it is to diversify your communication.

To build your Buyer Persona, start by knowing your audience in detail

You may already have a well-defined audience, but when was the last time you updated the information?

If you don’t know the answer, this is the time to do it – starting with the basics.

This information can be obtained from various sources, such as:

• Data already collected from your customers
• Interviews you can conduct for this purpose
• Analysis of benchmarks in your industry
• Trends that may be emerging in your industry
• Data collected and provided by the social media platforms you work with

For the latter case, Swonkie’s Advanced Reports can compile this information per social network. So, you don’t need to search for this data on each platform – wink!

Research demographic data

To know your audience, you need to start by collecting some key aspects, such as:

• Age
• Location
• Language
• Gender
• Occupation

Understand behaviors and habits

Now that you know who your audience is, you need to know how they behave.

At this point, you essentially need to research:

• What is their lifestyle like?
• What are their hobbies?
• What motivates them?
• What do they like to consume (whether objects or content)?
• What are their sources of information?

Every detail counts since the goal is to compile your audience into a single person!

(And it’s the details that make us more human)

Understand pains, uncertainties, and objectives

This is the most decisive moment – after all, brands’ goal is to reduce their audience’s pains and uncertainties.

For that, you need to clearly understand:

What are the pains of your audience?

What are their uncertainties?

Here, you can and should deepen your research by asking your audience or even analyzing complaints, reviews, forum questions, and other platforms.

But, above all, you need to know exactly what your audience’s objectives are, which can be divided into:

• Explicit objectives: those that the audience verbalizes. For example, when searching for a drill, the person explicitly wants to find a way to make a hole in the wall.
• Implicit objectives: those that are implied. Using the same example, in this case, your audience possibly wants to develop a new skill and feel proud of doing it.

Create your buyer persona

After gathering this data, it’s time to build your buyer persona!

“But how do I do that?”

Well, now it’s easy! Analyze all the information you collected from your audience analysis – and find patterns.

Once identified, the next phase will be easier: imagine what a typical person from your audience would be like. For that, give them:

• A name
• A face (it can even be a stock image)
• Age
• Profession/Occupation
• A life story, where you can include their likes, personality, and other information. You can also, to help, assign them one of the 12 archetypes.
• List their implicit and explicit objectives
• List the pains and uncertainties you identified
• Enumerate the points where this person gathers information
• Describe all their interests

To help you,we provide a template where you can organize this information.

And that’s it! Now you can repeat the process to create as many personas as you want – and as many as are relevant to your business.

Review regularly when needed

Just like people, your audience changes over time – and consequently, your buyer personas do too.

Especially nowadays, when we have access to more and more information and stimuli, change is not an accident – it is a fact and it will happen.

Therefore, it is advisable to be attentive and, at least quarterly, check if the buyer persona you defined still corresponds to your audience’s preferences.

And, as for social media data, you can always keep an eye on them with Swonkie. Test it now for 14 days, for free.