Buyer Persona: the profile of your potential customer.

Do you want to implement a marketing campaign and need to create a profile of your potential customer? The first step is to define and develop your buyer persona.

You can't move on to the operational plan without having defined your buyer persona, their characteristics, needs and desires that drive them to choose your product/service. This is why, the first step is to create and develop the identikit of your potential customer.

Creating the buyer persona is the focal point of any segmentation process. When we talk about buyer persona we refer to a typical representation of our potential customer. A fundamental representation not only for the increase in sales, but for any investment action that you decide to implement in the future.

This process, in fact, allows you to define an audience and a precise target towards which to direct a specific marketing strategy.

Could you guess someone's favorite food without knowing it at all?
Hard huh.

When we don't know who we're addressing, when we don't have enough information about our target audience, we risk compromising our strategy. The definition of the buyer persona allows us to increase the quality of our leads and to enhance the experience of our potential buyer.

3 steps to define your buyer persona

To create your target persona you will need to follow a few basic steps. Once you have identified your target audience, you will need to start getting more specific data. In a first phase of analysis, quantitative data will prove to be extremely useful and functional.

1. Define the main characteristics of your target person

The first thing to do is to understand the characteristics of the hypothetical ideal customer: interests, tastes, purchasing methods, hobbies. Learn more about psychological processes, the language used, habits. You need to identify some peculiarities that allow you to know your target at 360 degrees.

This can help you to evaluate not only the strengths of your marketing strategy, but above all any risks and/or difficulties you may encounter. Don't rule out the idea of having to create more buyer personas: two is better than one.

2. Take advantage of digital to collect data

Analyze your CRM or your customer database. Create targeted questionnaires to send to your consumers, in this way you can collect valuable information about your audience. Leverage online to send them by email to people who have already purchased your product/service.

There are numerous tools with which to carry out surveys: SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, Survio.
Hotjar is the ideal tool for analyzing user behavior on your website.

Carry out interviews to speak directly with the various subjects. Analyze social media insights and collect as much data as possible on which to base your strategy. This operation will allow you to acquire a more complete base from which to start.

3. Buyer persona and Google Analytics: get the most out of it

Google Analytics, thanks to its reports, allows you to extrapolate important information on the characteristics of your customers, behaviors, devices used.

In particular, Google Analytics provides four types of reports:

• The Audience report allows you to analyze demographics, interests, geographic data, devices used;
• The Acquisition report allows you to identify which sources generate the most traffic, which of your marketing campaigns is proving to be more performing;
• Within the Behavior report you will be able to find various information regarding the speed of the site, the search made by users, which of your pages receives the most traffic;
• Thanks to the Conversions report you will be able to have a clearer view of your revenues, the performance of your products, your sales.

Practical guide for building your audience

Following the data collection, you can proceed with the construction of your audience.

Let's try a practical example.

Let's say you have a clothing e-commerce. Thanks to the data collected, you will be able to outline a general outline of your potential customer:

Did you know that the percentage of female users is greater than the male one, that the average age is between 20 and 30 years old and that the majority of users live in Rome. Your target, to make purchasing decisions, mainly uses the smartphone. In fact, the largest number of conversions happen via mobile phone.

Your target's interests focus more on sports and fitness, shopping, beauty and wellness.

The channels that generate the most traffic are the organic one, the paid one and the social one.

Who could be a possible buyer persona?

Anna, 25, lives in Rome and has a degree in Fashion Sciences. Currently a fashion stylist with an annual income of around €24,000. Passionate about shopping, fitness, beauty and wellness. Anna mainly buys her clothing online by consulting social networks, Google research and the advertisements of the many brands she follows.

Strongly interested in fashion blogs and constantly updated on the latest trends. Anna is attentive to the quality of the clothes she wants to buy, in fact she doesn't like impulse purchases. Influenced not only by word of mouth, but above all by the fashions of the moment.

Buyer persona template: resources to use for the creation of your audience

Once you have obtained all the necessary information, you can build your buyer persona template. You can use templates that have already been created, semi-compiled or create a basic scheme yourself in which to insert the information you need. There are numerous tools, software and platforms that you can use in this phase.

Let's see some of them:

• Use Hubspot's tool, MakeMyPersona , to represent your buyer personas visually. Answer the pre-set questions and/or expand them yourself to generate a complete PDF document;
• Mural, software used for corporate visual thinking, has numerous templates that can be used;
• Miro , an online collaborative whiteboard, is used to create concept maps and diagrams. The platform also has templates that you can fill in to create your buyer persona;
• Xtensio is a platform that allows you to create creative and interactive presentations and documents.

Thanks to the use of these tools, you will be able to create a concrete model and discuss it with your work team.

Final considerations

Creating your buyer persona is essential to direct your marketing strategy towards a specific target. Having a focus is essential to understand not only who we are addressing, but also how we should do it and above all why.

Defining a buyer persona is essential to fully understand the buyer's journey . As we know, the process of purchasing a subject is by no means linear, but must be understood in order to propose effective solutions.

The segmentation process takes into consideration not only demographic aspects, but above all psychological aspects such as customer needs, purchase barriers and decision-making criteria.

Thanks to digital you can obtain a lot of valuable information and data that will allow you to know the profile of your potential customer. Resources, tools and platforms will make your job easier.