What Is a Buyer Persona?

Key takeaways

A buyer persona is a profile that represents your ideal customer, including needs, behaviors, and decision-making patterns.

• Buyer personas include characteristics such as buyer age, location, education, goals, pain points, and more. 

• The first step in developing your buyer personas is to gather data from your current customers and target audience through various data sources, including analytics, customer surveys, social media, focus groups, and competitor activities.

• You can use buyer personas to inform important decisions such as marketing channel choices, content tone, and how to encourage brand engagement. 

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What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona represents members of your business’s target audience. It’ll help you understand your target audience better and tailor marketing campaigns that are more likely to reach potential customers. 

When creating a buyer persona, you’ll identify characteristics of your typical customer, like:

• Age

• Location

• Occupation

• Education level

• Family status

• Goals

• Pain points 

• Purchasing patterns 

• Hobbies and interests

• Likes and dislikes 

• Values 

• Income and education level

Sample customer persona: Sandra, customer relations manager

Name: Sandra Williams

Age: 34

Occupation: Customer relations manager

Location: Chicago, Illinois

Interests: history, fashion, visiting museums

Who is Sandra?: Sandra is a married mom of a four-year-old daughter. She works remotely and manages customer relations for an online vintage resell shop.

What are Sandra’s pain points?: Sandra’s customers demand a lot of time, as vintage shoppers tend to expect high-end customer service experiences. She’s finding it difficult to provide the same amount of attention after a social media video caused her store to go viral and nearly tripled her customer base.

What is Sandra’s solution?: Sandra needs to find an affordable CRM software platform to take menial tasks off her hands and allow her more quality time with her customers.

Why use a buyer or audience persona?

Buyer personas can help you make important decisions about your marketing strategies, such as what channels to use, what tone to use for content, and how to encourage engagement with your brand. It also helps get every member of your team on the same page regarding your marketing and sales strategies. 

While buyer personas are important for marketing purposes, they can also guide your work in sales, customer service, and product development. Ultimately, a buyer persona can help you save time and money by marketing your products or services to the people who will most likely use them rather than trying to reach unresponsive audiences.

How to identify a buyer persona 

To get started, gather data from your current customers and target audience. You can do this through site analytics, customer surveys, your social media pages, focus groups, and your competitors' marketing activities, for example.

Once you've gathered your data, you can analyze it for trends, patterns, and insights. Create a template with the information you want to know about your buyer persona, and fill it in as you discover various facts; it may take some time to develop your ideal buyer persona. Keep in mind that the characters you create may change and evolve over time.

Consider creating an anti-buyer persona or a negative buyer persona, which will tell you who isn’t part of your target audience. For example, if you sell lawn care products, you probably won't target people who live in apartments.

Read more: Customer Segmentation: Definition, Examples + How to Do It 

Related terms

• Brand strategy

• Brand equity

• Brand marketing

• Conversion rate 

• Customer lifetime value

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