Buyer personas offer a path to understanding your ideal customer in more depth than traditional market segmentation. They allow you to collect and leverage detailed customer profiles in ways that help businesses deliver personalized offers, design products or services that address specific challenges, and speak a shared language across teams.
If anticipating your potential customers' habits and goals would improve your sales, organizational efficiency, and retention, then learning how to create a persona is more than worth the investment.
What is a buyer persona? Personas aims to increase meaningful engagement at multiple levels of your small business and help build valuable relationships with your clients. Serving clients means knowing what they need and want, but dancing between data analysis and anecdotal input from customer-facing employees still contains a level of guesswork.
Buyer personas are tools that offer those deeper insights beyond market segmentation, typically capturing:
Don’t forget to consider your negative buyer persona—a representation of customers you don’t want to target. Avoiding these leads can save valuable resources and improve your marketing efforts.
The benefits of learning how to create a buyer persona and integrating them into your sales process include:
Start with what you already know about your target market. Whether that’s dog owners willing to pay for convenience, first-time homebuyers, or anyone in a 10-mile radius who loves soup, arrive at a starting point of what you know (and guess) about your ideal customer.
A crucial part of creating a detailed persona involves in-depth research. Remember, although you’ll end up choosing a fictional name, everything else on your customer persona card will be drawn from facts and patterns originating in new and available data.
Let’s start with whom to study. You’ll collect information about your:
Research methods typically include some or all of the following options, which can either be managed internally or outsourced:
In addition to acquiring new research responses, you’ll also mine data and anecdotal input from your:
Finally, you can incorporate data from:
Next, it’s time to use this valuable research. Start grouping similar traits and behaviors to organize the multitude of data points that will help shape your personas.
Some of the common patterns that businesses collect while building personas include:
You don’t need to include every bit of information your research uncovers—you’re looking for patterns and commonalities that align with critical segments and buyer groups for your business.
For instance, a local bakery could segment their target audience into:
Some businesses may want to start with Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg’s approach to buying modalities. They segment their target customer base into four groups, shown below with their key drivers and estimated share of the buying spectrum:
Your approach to building multiple personas will combine the boundaries of your research results with identifying useful intersections across persona characteristics, such as demographics and buying behavior.
Knowing how to create a buyer persona doesn’t mean you have to start from scratch sketching out a persona card or slide. There are templates, generators, and examples readily available online, including tools from UXPressia, HubSpot’s Make My Persona, and Mobility Labs’ PersonaGenerator.
Let’s take a look at a sample persona for the bakery mentioned above:
The final persona card includes a stock photo selected to represent known or median demographics. It could also include descriptive buzzwords or even a specific quote from a customer interview that effectively summarized a standout customer persona trait.
Personas will shift over time because some of the traits and trends they represent grow or change, and also as you refine them with additional research, study, and input.
Once you’ve drafted, circulated, and finalized your initial set of different personas, it’s time to put them into use by building persona-specific:
One of the best ways to test personas is by keeping a close eye on marketing analytics. Randomly splitting the recipient list for a given persona’s campaign enables A/B testing to determine how different language, offers, and imagery affect customer experience and response. Using the gathered data, you can continuously refine and adjust the persona’s values, traits, and response points to improve performance.
See related: ICP vs. persona
Curious to see how buyer personas work in practice? Consider how John Consigli, a local plumber, more than doubled his business by understanding his customers at the persona-based level. With this information, he was able to locate ideal customers with Nextdoor.
While personas create a specific individual profile that represents a single slice of your market, using hyper-targeted methods like personas doesn’t limit your reach. Instead, after learning how to create a persona and finalizing yours, you can segment further and personalize more.
Plus, increased relationship-building can open up new opportunities, as was the case for Coco Hankerson, founder of e-waste recycling service Coco The Geek. Although 98% of her clients came from geotargeting tech enthusiasts with Nextdoor Business Posts and Local Deals, her business landed its first commercial client based on a customer referral from a Nextdoor member.
Buyer personas help businesses clarify who their customers are, what they want, and how to engage and attract them. One of their biggest benefits is understanding where to connect with prospects and customers.
That’s where Nextdoor Business network comes in. After claiming your Nextdoor Business Page, you can engage customers with business posts, build trust with recommendations, and set up Nextdoor ad campaigns that target your buyer personas.
What’s more, the comprehensive Nextdoor Ads Manager dashboard tracks and analyzes results to help you understand exactly what works best to capture attention.
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