Creating buyer personas is more than just a fun marketing exercise; it’s an essential practice to creating marketing and video collateral that works. But what is a buyer persona? How do you create them? Here’s everything you need to know about creating buyer personas for your marketing strategy.

What is a buyer persona?

In short, buyer personas are fictional characters that represent segments of your target audience. These characters are fully fleshed out with demographics, psychographics, and value systems. They have names and identities. Your brand should create 2-5 buyer personas, depending on how may niches you’re trying to reach. Personas evolve over time as your audience builds and develops.

Why create buyer personas?

Creating buyer personas give your brand a complex and intimate understanding of your target market. This understanding helps you create marketing content that speaks to at least one core essence of your target market. If you create content and it wouldn’t appeal to one of your personas, then it will probably miss the mark with your real-life audience. Insights gained from buyer personas tell you what your consumers value. Create content appealing to these values and watch consumers flock to your brand. The key is creating buyer personas that truly reflect your consumer base.

How to create buyer personas that work:

• Start broad.

When creating buyer personas from scratch, you’ll need to start out broadly. Ask yourself: who is the person purchasing this product? What are they purchasing it for? For themselves? As a gift for someone else? These different purchasing patterns give you a solid base to start from.

• Flesh out the personal details.

Now comes the hard part: digging into the personal details of your buyer personas. Your personas need to be fully fleshed out in order to provide value to your strategy. Lost on where to start? Here are some demo- and psychographic categories to get your started:

• Name: Yes, you want to give your personas a name. Also, you’ll want to assign them a photo. This helps your team to see this persona as a real person and not just a generic list of traits.
• Gender: What is the gender of this consumer?
• Age: What age range does this consumer fall into?
• Location: Where does this persona live? In a city? In a rural area?
• Job: What job title does this persona carry? What field(s) do they work in?
• Income: What is the income range of this persona? What is their disposable income range?
• Education Level: What is the education level of this persona?
• Family/Relationship Status: Does this persona have a significant other? Do they have children?
• Interests: What hobbies does your persona have? What do they do in their spare time?
• Buying Motivation: What are your persona’s reasons to buy your product?
• Buying Concerns: What are their reservations about buying your product?
• Shopping Habits: How does your persona shop? Do they pick from what’s available in a chain store? Do they shop exclusively online? How do they find new products to try?

We know it seems cumbersome, but your buyer personas need a complete identity. Answering these questions give you great insight into what your consumers need and want from you as a brand.

• Check site analytics first.

Don’t want to start completely from scratch? Your site analytics are a great source of information about consumers you already have. Tools such as Google Analytics can give you a heap of demographic information to start creating buyer personas from. Also check the target audience you created for your most successful social media ad campaigns. Audiences that you know convert let you see what makes you so appealing to your consumers.

Researching your competitor’s target audience is another great place to start. Unless your products dramatically differ, learning who they’re targeting gives you an idea of what niches in the market you should be targeting as well. Look at who interacts with your competitor on social media, and create personas from there.

• Make negative personas

We know you just went through the exhausting task of creating multiple, fully fleshed out personas, but if you want to go above and beyond, it’s time to create negative personas. You’ve created buyer personas based on your ideal and current target audiences, but it’s also important to acknowledge who isn’t in your target audience. Negative personas do precisely that. They advise you on what types of people you don’t want to appeal to. When creating content, this can give you certain ideas and topics to stray away from, giving your actual audience content more in tune with their needs.

If you’ve followed this far, congrats! You now have a handful of complete buyer personas. Now you can create niche marketing content that is guaranteed to grab the attention of your target audience. Now get creating! Just remember to reflect on your personas every once in a while and update them as your business flourishes

Would you like to learn more about creating buyer personas, or about any other video topic? Reach out to IDR for additional information and answers to all your questions. You’ll discover why we’re Orange County’s premier producer of TV commercials, infomercials, and online videos for a wide range of businesses, organizations, and brands.