How to create a buyer persona for your business

Understanding who your customers are is important – data and research can help.

Creating a personal experience for your customers is key if you want to inspire loyalty. Building a buyer persona – a description of your ideal customer – is a great way to start doing this.

Here’s how to do just that.

Look at the information you already have

Building a buyer persona should involve both internal and external research. You may already have a rough idea of what this will look like, based on your existing customers, but to get a clear picture of your ideal customer, you should consider:

• Personal and professional information

• Values and fears

• Goals and challenges

• Online presence

• Negative information

Templates like this one from Shopify can be very useful to gather answers.

Understand there can be multiple buyer personas

It’s quite common for businesses to have multiple buyer personas. For example if you own a furniture shop, one type of persona might be ‘new home owner’, and another may be ‘hotel owners’, or even ‘landlords’. They are very different personas in what they might be looking for and their budgets, but still come to you for their furniture.

If your company has multiple buyer personas, then make sure you give each a different name and assign example photos – using free stock images from Burst or Pexels – to help you remember the different groups of people.

Use surveys to get to know what customers want

If you already have existing customers that fit your ideal buyer persona, you could ask them what you want to know directly.

SurveyMonkey and Google Forms are easy and simple tools to create free customer surveys, which you can then share with your customers through email and newsletter tools, like MailChimp.

If you want to encourage customers to answer, you could try offering a discount or free shipping on their next purchase.

Use your own website and social analytics

If your business is up and running, customers will already be interacting with you. You can make the most of this by using tools like Google Analytics to help you find out more about them, such as their age and gender, how much time they spend on your website, how many times they have visited your page and how they found it.

If you’re also using social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram to offer customer service, promote your business or sell products, you can get similar insights too with the likes of Meta Business Suite.

Watch your competitors

Keeping an eye on who your competitors are selling to is also very useful, especially if they’re well established.

You can use free programmes like Similar Web to analyse any website’s visitors and audience, so this is a great way to see who’s coming to your competitors. You can get information on their customers’ age, gender, location and interests. Plus, you can also discover new audiences and build additional buyer personas for your business by using this software.

Get ready to discover your ideal buyer persona

Creating your business persona can help you plan for your business’ future, while helping you to stand out against competitors and reach more customers. Whether you’ve done this before or it’s completely new to you, there are plenty of tools and resources to help your find your ideal customers.

You may have already spoken to one of our V-Hub Digital Advisers, but if not and you're looking for more support you can get in touch here. Our Knowledge Centre is also packed with information and tips to help you on your digital journey