Assuming you know who your ideal customer is can be detrimental to your business. Without a clear understanding of your target audience, your marketing efforts might be ineffective. That’s why developing detailed buyer personas is crucial.

This post will discuss what buyer personas are (and aren’t), how to create them, and will provide some concrete illustrations.

Buyer Personas: A Summary

In essence, buyer personas represent the combined values, behaviors, and traits of your perfect customers, condensed into distinct profiles. Buyer personas can range from highly intricate to quite straightforward, depending on the type of business you have and the kind of people who usually buy your products or services. However, buyer personas typically encompass similar data, such as:

• Demographic information
• Behavior
• Motivations
• Goals Let’s examine each of these qualities separately and see how they apply to buyer personas.

Buyer Persona Demographics

Demographic data forms the foundation of any well-defined buyer persona. Without it, it’s tough to construct a sufficiently complex persona or truly grasp who your ideal customers are.

Demographic data is any information that allows you to divide your potential market into more specific segments. This encompasses gender, age, income or education level, ethnicity, and so forth. Depending on the specific requirements of your business, demographic data can be quite general or extremely specific. For instance, many buyer personas use an ideal age range for the perfect customer instead of a specific number. This principle holds true for most demographic categories, such as income level. Others, like education level, might be more precise. Demographic data is an excellent starting point for creating your own buyer personas. You could begin by specifying that your ideal customer is:

• Between 35 and 45 years old
• Female
• Has a college degree
• Earns $70,000 or more annually We’re starting to build our example buyer persona, but for most businesses, the above information won’t be enough – we need more depth. That’s where behavior comes into play.

Consumer Behavior in Buyer Personas

Now that we’re getting a clearer picture of who our ideal customer is, we need to explore how they act to get a more complete understanding.

Including consumer behavior in your buyer personas might feel like speculation, but this phase should be as data-driven as any other aspect of your marketing strategy. To begin pinpointing behavioral patterns of your ideal customers for incorporation into your buyer personas, you’ll need to examine your analytics data. What conversion paths do your ideal customers follow? How and where in the funnel do they engage with your marketing materials? You can also leverage predictive analysis tools to identify potential paths to conversion. Think of your consumers’ behavioral patterns as the what in your buyer personas. Next, you need to consider objectives – the why of your personas. On a side note: As you’ve probably noticed, we’re going to be discussing data extensively in this post. That being said, ensure you’re familiar with the best practices for protecting your customers’ data!

Consumer Objectives

We’ve mentioned it numerous times, but it’s worth repeating: consumers aren’t looking to buy things, they want solutions to their problems – whatever they purchase is just a way to achieve that. This explains why it’s practically universally acknowledged that people dislike being sold to, because they don’t want to simply buy stuff, they want to improve their lives.

This principle forms the basis of consumer objectives. Once you’ve figured out how your ideal customer makes purchases, you need to understand why they make those purchases. This task might take a little longer, as you may need to depend on qualitative research methods like surveys or questionnaires, but the more effort you invest in understanding your customers’ motivations, the more accurate your buyer personas will be. Furthermore, you can refine your existing marketing strategies based on this newly acquired knowledge to enhance the effectiveness of your nurture channels.

Constructing Buyer Personas

Before you start creating your buyer personas, you need to determine the stage of the purchasing journey you’re creating them for. For instance, you might choose to develop a detailed buyer persona for a prospect in the education stage of the funnel. Remember – just because they’re called buyer personas doesn’t mean these profiles need to represent people ready and eager to make a purchase. You can create buyer personas for every stage of the purchasing journey (which you can map out by gathering customer insights). Just as we dissected each component of a buyer persona in the previous section, you should create your buyer personas in stages, with each stage building upon the specifics of the preceding one. The most sensible place to begin is with demographic data.

Creating A Buyer Persona: Demographics

To illustrate the buyer persona creation process, let’s construct a real persona using a fictional scenario. Suppose you’re creating buyer personas for a landscaping and lawn care company. With this in mind, you might decide that your ideal customer (or one of them, as we’ll soon see) is:

• Male
• Between 35 and 55 years old
• Has an annual income of at least $50,000 Before proceeding, let’s analyze why this demographic data might be relevant to your initial lawn care and landscaping business buyer persona.

First, it’s wise to aim for a representative sample of your customer base in terms of gender. Even the most traditionally “masculine” businesses, such as hardware stores, are never solely male-oriented, and disregarding other segments of your customer base could be a misstep. Second, the age demographic is significant to this example business due to a few key factors (or educated assumptions). For one thing, most people who would hire a landscaping and lawn care company are homeowners, as renters are generally not responsible for maintaining the property surrounding an apartment or rental unit. Considering this, we can reasonably assume that your ideal customer falls between the ages of 35 and 55 because homeownership rates are considerably higher in older age groups. Another aspect to consider is the average mortgage in the United States. Given that the average mortgage is approximately $235,000, we can deduce that the typical homeowner would need to earn at least $50,000 per year to manage the monthly payments on a mortgage of this size (factoring in an average interest rate of 4.5%). We’re making progress. Your buyer persona might require more demographic details than this, but you can see how dissecting logical assumptions about the type of person who might use your products or services can provide a reasonably accurate starting point.

Creating a Buyer Persona: Consumer Behavior

The next step in creating your buyer persona focuses on behavior. This stage might not be as easy to summarize as demographic data, as the way real people act is often far more complex than the relatively simple categories they fall into demographically.

This is also where demographic data like gender can become increasingly relevant. For instance, let’s assume your first persona represents your ideal male customer. While it’s crucial to rely on data over assumptions, certain behaviors can be typical of many individuals. For example, your ideal male customer might be (or perceive themselves to be) more knowledgeable about lawn care or landscaping than the “average” person. This behavior could lead to more direct inquiries about your services or limit potential upselling opportunities. Similarly, based on their behavior, this customer might be highly goal-oriented in their purchasing decisions, whereas a female customer might be more aspirational. Whatever behaviors you integrate into your buyer personas, it’s essential to base them on real data from your conversion paths. Analyze conversion data from Google Analytics and carefully examine the various paths your best customers take, from the initial education phase all the way to making a purchase. How much information do they require before taking action? How does their customer lifecycle compare to that of “casual” customers? Are you doing enough to engage them and provide them with the information and resources they need to commit to a purchase? Making assumptions about how people behave can be disastrous, particularly because you could end up investing significant time and money targeting the wrong individuals based on inaccurate behavioral assumptions.

Creating a Buyer Persona: Consumer Objectives

Once you’ve identified how your customers behave, it becomes much simpler to assess their ultimate goals – a critical component of any buyer persona. In its simplest form, you can think of consumer objectives as what your ideal customer sets out to achieve when they click on your ad, buy something from your website, or call your business. None of these actions occur randomly – there’s always an objective in mind.

There are several potential objectives prospective customers might have when interacting with your business:

• Comparing prices
• Seeking information
• Making a direct purchase Each of these objectives can manifest in various ways. For example, the price comparison objective might also involve elements of seeking information, such as if the prospect just wants to know how much you charge to remove a stubborn tree stump. Similarly, these objectives can change fluidly and rapidly. A prospect might call to inquire about the cost of something, only to be so impressed by your competitive rates that they convert instantly by purchasing your services. Consequently, it’s crucial to assign objectives to your buyer personas that both align with your sales funnel and can transition from one stage to another.

Similar to behavior, consumer objectives should be determined based on actual data from your conversion paths and nurture programs and then applied to the data you’ve already compiled for the other aspects of your personas. For example, one of your buyer personas might begin to resemble this once behavior and objectives have been factored in:

• Male
• Between 35 and 55 years old
• Has an annual income of at least $50,000
• Homeowner
• Visits websites multiple times to gather necessary information
• Directly compares/contrasts similar business websites to determine value
• Prefers sites with comprehensive pricing details
• Highly motivated by pricing incentives/discounts With this level of detail, your buyer personas allow you to craft increasingly targeted marketing messages that directly resonate with this individual. The demographic data prequalifies them as a viable lead or potential customer, your educational materials can cater to their desire for ample information before making a decision, and your pricing page can help address potential objections and eliminate barriers between the prospect and a conversion. Of course, every business is unique, so no two buyer personas will be exactly alike. However, it’s just as important to consider negative personas as it is to develop detailed, accurate profiles of your ideal customers.

Understanding Negative Buyer Personas

In simple terms, negative buyer personas are composite profiles of individuals you don’t want as customers. If negative keywords are terms you want to exclude from your PPC campaigns, negative personas are profiles of customers you don’t want to advertise or market to.

You might find it easier to create negative buyer personas after finalizing your actual buyer personas, as your negative personas will generally be the opposite of your ideal customers. As with your buyer personas, demographic data serves as an excellent starting point when creating your negative personas, as you can quickly and easily identify demographics that aren’t relevant to your business. Continuing with our landscaping and lawn care business example, you could start building a negative buyer persona by specifying that you’re not interested in marketing to individuals who:

• Rent their homes instead of owning them
• Earn less than $50,000 annually (or have limited disposable income) Clearly, this is a fairly basic starting point, but when it comes to identifying individuals unlikely to purchase your products or services, it’s simpler to pinpoint characteristics of people who don’t qualify as viable leads than to identify the traits of your perfect customer. One thing to keep in mind when creating negative buyer personas is to avoid being overly exclusive, as this could excessively restrict your potential customer base or discount the possibility that someone who isn’t an ideal customer currently could become one later. An overly broad negative buyer persona could inadvertently exclude individuals still in the consideration phase of the funnel, so try to focus on qualities that definitively disqualify them from your target audience, such as income level or homeownership status in our example above.

Familiarize Yourself with Your Ideal Customers

Naturally, it’s challenging to create flawless buyer personas without knowing more about your business and your target audience, but hopefully these tips have provided you with some ideas on how to create your own personas. For further assistance, take a look at these buyer persona examples. If you have any questions about anything discussed in this post, feel free to leave a comment below, and I’ll do my best to answer them.