5 Building Blocks of Your Perfect Buyer Persona

5 Building Blocks of Your Perfect Buyer Persona

If you’ve been with us for any amount of time you know and I know that all good marketing is customer focused.

The more you know about your best customer, the better you can communicate with them and the faster you can escort them through your funnel.

The best way to identify your perfect customer is by creating what we call a buyer persona or a client avatar.

Your Perfect Buyer Persona is physical representation of your perfect customer.

Your Perfect Buyer Persona

Each buyer persona is unique and will look different depending on who is creating it but there are some core consistencies between them.

Your Perfect Buyer Persona is going to include the following 5 elements.

1. Demographic Data

Demographic data is probably the easiest to find because it’s everywhere. Just because it’s easy to get, however, don’t underestimate its power. How you “talk” to a baby-boomer is going to be drastically different than how you “talk” to a millennial.

Demographic data includes things like …

  • age
  • sex
  • marital status
  • where they live
  • do they have kids

2. Goals and Values

With Goals and Values what we’re really trying to find out here is what is important to them? What do they want out of life?

Some questions you might ask here include:

  • What is important to them in their personal/professional life?
  • What does success mean to them?
  • What types of causes do they support?

3. Challenges and Frustrations

This is an interesting category because a lot of times a user’s challenges or frustration may not be directly related to the product or service we are offering but it’s still great information to have.

Even if our product/service isn’t directly related – we can still use this information in our marketing message as an analogy or example to elicit the response we’re looking for.

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4. Sources of Information

Sources of information will tell us two different things.

  1. It provides us with more information about their likes and dislikes which we may be able to use in our marketing message but more importantly it tells us.
  2. where to hang out to find other people just like them.

As an example: If I know that my perfect customer is a business owner that likes to read my local Business Journal – the chances are that other Business Journal readers would also be a good customer for me. So … When my funnel is complete and I want to drive more targeted traffic to it .. A great place for me to start would be in my local Business Journal.

If I knew that my perfect customer was a construction worker that listened to Sports Talk Radio all day – I’d probably want to put my message out in that medium.

Make Sense?

5. Objections and Beliefs

Last but definitely not least is Objections and Beliefs. This is where we find out how Your Perfect Customer feels about your market or industry.

Here’s a great example: I’d say that at least 75% of the people that contact us here at Black Dog Marketing have had a negative experience with a previous web developer.

Crappy skills, no communication or many time – flat out not doing what they are supposed to be doing.

Because I know this … I can talk about how we DON’T do this in my marketing message.

In essence I can answer the questions that my prospect is having in their mind before they ask it. If I can handle their objections early on in the conversation – then there is nothing distracting them from receiving my message.

Realistically, we may not know all of this and that’s OK but as marketers (and if you are a small business owner you’re a marketer) our goal is to find out as much as we can.

Here’s an example that we got from Shopifynation.

Sally The Dog Owner

sally

Statement: “Ever Since I was a kid I’ve had a cat or a dog in the house and I don’t think I could live without my pet. As I’ve become more aware of the nasty ingredients in pet food, I’ve started to shop more carefully for other pet products as well as learn what I can do to make my home safer for my pet.”

Buzzwords: Pet Friendly, organic, natural, antibiotic-free.

Mannerisms: I am positive, I love to live life and to be inspired. I have an appreciation and respect for animals.

My question for you …

Do you think if I knew this about my target market that it would change how I spoke to them?

The pictures that I use?

The words that I use?

You better believe it! So if you don’t already have at least one buyer persona for your business … do that now.

If you already have one … this would be a great opportunity to dig it out, dust it off and update it accordingly.

Now it’s your turn …

Use the comments box below to let me know if you have buyer personas for your business.

One thought on “5 Building Blocks of Your Perfect Buyer Persona

  1. Great tips, buyer persona is something I’ve been struggling to understand – I always found it silly to make a person up, and I wasn’t sure what traits I needed to define, and which I didn’t. Adding a photo really brings yours to life. Time to start working on mine!

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