If you’re like most entrepreneurs, your business is constantly changing. You may be at the beginning stages of a new venture, or you might be in the midst of a major transition. Either way, it’s important to understand who your customers are and what they want from you.

You can use buyer personas — fictional profiles that represent your ideal customer — to help you better understand your target market and how to reach them, as well as avoid unprofitable or loss-making clients and customers.

What is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a fictional profile of an ideal customer for your business. It’s not a demographics profile (age, gender), but rather a personality that represents specific needs and desires of your ideal customer.

This helps you create products that have rousing demand in the market, create marketing messages that resonate with their needs and interests.

The steps to create a buyer persona or more than one buyer personas are in fact quite simple. But the internal processes may vary depending on your startup market and niche.

Need any help with this? Send us an email at adhip[at]winsavvy.com or book a meeting for free here and we will show you how we do it.

#1. Hypothesize your target market:

Unless it’s backed by research, it is always a hypothesis. That’s why for our first step, we are going to depend on your intuition.

Identify a problem in the market that you are trying to fix

The first step in creating a buyer persona is to identify the problem that your persona needs solved. Think about what problems your product solves, and then who might need that solution? What other businesses do they work with? What problems do they have? What motivates them? What do they like or dislike?

Now look at the potential buyers in the market

Just because individuals face a problem in a market, doesn’t mean they would be willing to pay the price at which you offer them the solution.

You need to identify the demographics, psychographics, and behavior patterns of your ideal customers.

Ask yourself – who do you want to serve? Who do you think will be your most profitable customers? Who do you think will be your unprofitable and potentially loss-making customers? What will be their age, education, marital status or job profile look like.

Here are some examples:

• Age — Young adults, middle-aged professionals, retirees;
• Gender — Men, women, transgendered people;
• Income level — Low income earners, high income earners;
• Location — City dwellers, country people.

#2. Market Research

Market research can play a key role in helping a business create buyer personas. By conducting market research, a business can gather valuable information on its target market, including demographics, psychographics, and behavior patterns.

This information can be used to create a detailed profile of the ideal customer, including their needs, wants, and pain points.

While there are several methods of market research that can be used to gather information on your target market, including surveys, interviews, focus groups, and online research, we at WinSavvy, find that surveys, online research and online interviews are the most effective in terms of speed and quality.

Surveys, for example, can be used to gather information on demographics, such as age, gender, income, and occupation. Interviews and focus groups can provide more in-depth information on customer needs and pain points.

Online research can be used to gather information on customer behavior and preferences, such as the websites they visit, social media platforms they use, and products they purchase.

Interviews help provide more in-depth and qualitative data, but takes up more time and can’t be done on-scale if you have a limited budget.

Once the data is collected, it should be analyzed to identify patterns and common characteristics among the target market.

This information can be used to create a fictional representation of the ideal customer, known as a buyer persona. These personas should be validated with real customers to ensure they accurately represent the target market.

Need any help with this? Send us an email at adhip[at]winsavvy.com or book a meeting for free here and we will show you how we do it.

Competitor Research

Another way to creating buyer personas is to identify the main competitors in your industry, that is, businesses that serve solutions with regard to similar market pain points as your business.

You then need to ask yourself and conduct more thorough research on who are the ones buying from these companies? What can we offer that they can’t? What pain points do these companies cause their customers? Who are the most profitable and least profitable customers?

Once you’ve figured out these answers, you can create buyer personas based on these insights. This will help you identify which types of people are likely to buy from your business, what they want from it and how best to communicate with them.

Need any help with this? Send us an email at adhip[at]winsavvy.com or book a meeting for free here and we will show you how we do it.

#3. Define your Target Market

Now that you know who are the buyers in your business niche are, it’s time to group them up into segments:

#1. Demographic Segmentation: Age, gender, income, education, and occupation

#2. Psychographic Segmentation: Lifestyle, values, interests, and personality traits

#3. Behavioral Pattern Segmentation: Purchasing habits, brand loyalty, and usage of products or services.

#4. Geographic location: Where your target market is located, such as by country, region, or city.

#5. Industry: Where does your target market belong to, such as legal industry or retail industry.

#6. Pain points and needs: Identify the problems and needs that your target market is facing and how your product or service can address them.

#4. Analyze Data and Look for Points of Parity

Look for patterns and common characteristics among your target market to create a detailed profile of your ideal customer.

The following is a list of questions that will help you analyze your data. These are only a few of the many questions that you could ask yourself when reviewing your data.

1) What are the differences between these segments? Which attributes are they similar on? Which attributes are they different on?

2) Are there any similarities or differences between the segments’ scores on the variables used in your statistical analysis? Which segments have common factors? Which segments do I want more as my customer or client?

3) How does this information relate to my hypotheses about my target market?

4) How does this information relate to my marketing strategy?

5) What can I do with this information to better understand my target market and how they act in a given situation?

6) Do any of these segments have different needs than others? Which segments are more important to me right now?

7) Should I exclude any of the variables from further analysis because they don’t seem relevant for these segments or for the outcome variable (in this case, consumer behavior)?

8) How will this data help me make informed decisions about my product or services in the future?

#5. Create a Personality for Your Target Buyer

Now that you have weeded out the chuff, you have got an assortment of geographic locations, demographic patters, personality and behavorial traits that form your ideal customer.

Here is an example of how to create a persona for your target buyer:

Creating a detailed persona like this one can help you understand your target market better and develop effective marketing and sales strategies that will appeal to them.

#6. Validate your Ideal Customer Personas

Test your personas with real customers to ensure they accurately represent your target market.

Show them your proof of concept and your MVP (if you have one) and ask them what they think. If you don’t have a product yet, show them websites and apps that are similar to yours and ask them what they like about the product and what they don’t like.

You should also run surveys on social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook to see if people who are similar to your ideal buyer personas are interested in your idea.

How to Use Your Buyer Personas to Improve Your Business Strategy

The information from your buyer personas can vastly improve product development processes and strategies, as well as your marketing and sales processes.

#1. How buyer personas improve product development processes and strategies

Having well-defined buyer personas can streamline and improve product development processes and strategies.

Here’s how it helps:

1. Identifies specific customer needs and wants

2. Improves customer experience

3. Facilitates better decision-making

4. Improves quality assurance (QA) efforts

5. In case of digital products, it improves UI, UX and helps create better designed websites with high conversion rates.

#2. How buyer personas improve marketing and sales processes.

Buyer personas improve marketing and sales processes by:

1. Helping you to understand what motivates your customers (and prospective customers) to buy from you — and how you can help them achieve their goals.
2. Helping you understand how to talk to different types of buyers in the right way at the right time, so that they listen to you, trust you and buy from you
3. Improving lead generation by matching up buyer personas with content that resonates most strongly with each persona, as well as offering personalized landing pages and downloadables. It also helps retarget your potential clients/ customers/ users with more targeted messaging.
4. Aligning sales and marketing teams on a common goal;
5. Improving communication between sales and marketing;
6. Reducing the time it takes for salespeople to prospect for new leads; and
7. Reducing the number of leads that have to be screened before they’re qualified.

WinSavvy Hack: Don’t Forget to Create Your Points of Differentiation during your Product Development Process. It’s Intrinsically Connected to Your Buyer Persona as it Helps Signal Your USP to Your Ideal Clients/Customers and Shows why they Should Buy From You. We, at WinSavvy often create a Points of Differentiation as a Continuous Process when we Create Buyer Personas.

Want us to help create your business’ buyer persona? Send us an email at adhip[at]winsavvy.com or book a meeting for free here and we will guide you through!