What is a buyer persona? Definition and template

What are we talking about when we say Buyer Persona?

Buyer Persona: Definition

On the surface, a buyer persona is a fairly simple tool. It's a fictional representation of an imaginary character that describes a coherent group of potential buyers and their common characteristics: it's your ideal customer.

You'll find many variations in the definition of buyer personas and just as many variations in how to work with them. Among the characteristics typically found in personas, you'll discover:

• Demographic data: age, gender, location, education level...

• Social characteristics: profession, income, hobbies, family situation...

• Psychological aspects: major personality traits

• Behavioral habits: communication channels (social media, email, phone), communication tools (computer, tablet, mobile), etc.

Sometimes, you'll find lists of extremely specific information (underwear color, marked kleptomania toward ballpoint pens) or rather conceptual information like "representative" quotes of your persona's mindset.

But we advise you not to fall into the illusion of depth by adding insignificant or irrelevant details. The social and psychological characteristics you detail only matter if they're true and have an influence on your target segment's purchasing behaviors.

The goal of a buyer persona is to understand your different types of clients/prospects in order to implement responses tailored to their challenges. We focus on prospects' intentions, the questions they ask themselves, their motivations, and their behavior.

Don't confuse with user personas. A buyer persona isn't necessarily a user. For example:

• Parents might buy toys for their children—they're the ones who purchased them (buyer persona), but it's the children who will use them (user persona)

• A department head might buy software (buyer persona), while their employees will be the ones using it (user persona)

The needs, desires, and motivations won't be the same depending on these two types of clients. A buyer persona will necessarily be concerned with price, for example, while a user persona will primarily care about having an effective product.

Why define your marketing personas?

This is an essential tool for your inbound marketing strategy. This approach has become unavoidable and requires a deep understanding of your target's challenges to guide them toward resolution and create a satisfying experience for your current and future customers. Be careful—it's not about attracting just anyone, but intercepting the person who matches your offer through an adapted marketing strategy.

Furthermore, to create relevant content, you need to write it with a perfect understanding of the person who needs it and what they're trying to accomplish. It's now unthinkable to initiate a relevant content strategy without serious work on personas.

But personas are also useful for sales teams. Prospecting and the sales process rely on continuously providing value to the client. This value delivery is impossible without truly considering their challenges and the questions they ask during the sales process. You can even evolve your offering to match their expectations—they're the ones who will guide you toward your growth opportunities.

More generally, using personas is at the root of good synergy between product, marketing, and sales teams. You need to involve everyone in the exercise. Ultimately, it's the entire organization that will be oriented in the same direction: serving your customers better before, during, and after using your products or services.

How to create personas in B2B vs B2C?

Defining your buyer personas in B2B isn't quite the same as defining your buyer personas in B2C. The purchasing process isn't the same:

• In B2C, it's about individual decision-making, based on personal judgment

• In B2B, decision-making is collective. You'll need to deal with multiple stakeholders, and the purchase is primarily thoughtful and deliberate

Consequently, you'll need to provide interesting and relevant content to your B2B buyer personas to help them make the purchase decision while developing a trust relationship. And you'll need to think about both the company itself and the decision-making individuals within that company to build your persona (who may not necessarily be your first contact).

How to create a persona sheet in 3 steps?

Establish your ideal customer profile

Defining your target customer isn't a creative exercise. It's not about fantasizing about an ideal imaginary target. Start from your real targets, your real sales:

• Who buys your products or services?

• Why?

• What questions do they ask during the sales process?

• What do they type into search engines?

Start by grouping your current clients and prospects into target groups with common characteristics. Every exchange, every conversation, should allow you to get useful answers.

Some of you will probably tell me that when you're starting out or pivoting, this is impossible. In that case, start with hypotheses, but you need to make continuous updates. Every new sale should lead you to challenge your personas to refine them based on reality, particularly by drawing on your market research.

Finally, don't think you need to ask tons of questions to detail your personas—exhaustiveness is useless and counterproductive. What's the point of knowing your persona's favorite cereal brand if you're not a cereal seller?

Work on your personas' motivations

The descriptive elements traditionally studied in buyer personas are important but largely insufficient if you want to build a solid strategy. The real issue is understanding the "why" of your customers. You need to understand why your customers would want to use your product or service. What's their goal?

I have good news for you—there's a very effective method for deepening your personas' real motivations: the Jobs-to-be-Done method. Its principle is simple, derived from a quote by an American economist:

"People don't want quarter-inch drills. They want quarter-inch holes in their walls." - Theodore Levitt

Starting from this "philosophy," Clayton Christensen developed jobs-to-be-done, literally "work to be done." Working this way allows you to describe, precisely, the functional, social, and emotional motivations of a customer regarding an offering.

Detail your personas' customer journey

There's only one thing left for you to better understand your customers: reconstruct the "Buyer Journey." At this stage, you know:

• Who your customer is, your target audience

• What their real challenges and objectives are

But you also need to understand the path your customer takes, from identifying their problem to its resolution. This is very important because it allows you to adapt your marketing campaigns to the journey stages. The "buyer journey" also helps you identify and respect your customer's timing. For assistance, you can rely on UX and UI design.

Example: It's pointless to try selling a content management tool to someone who doesn't yet have a digital strategy. It's counterproductive: How could they understand they need a content management tool when they have no content or visitors?

3-step persona template

Identify your buyer personas' profile

Demographic data of your personas

• Gender
Depending on the industry and type of position, you might encounter more women, more men, or both. This can influence how you communicate or package your products and services.

• Age
This will help you identify behavioral trends but also and especially the communication methods that are now very specific to age groups.

• Education Level
This can indicate income specifics but especially ways of thinking. Education level actually has little to do with decision quality. However, it has everything to do with your persona's decision-making process.

• Income
Here, we're interested in the persona's socio-professional category (SPC). We often think this gives a purchasing power indication, which is true, but it's mainly a relationship with money that it describes.

Social and professional characteristics of your personas

• Profession
The job your persona holds is crucial for properly defining their consumption, behavior, and interest habits. In B2B, profession is probably the most important information.

• Seniority
This allows you to situate your persona's level of responsibility in the company and their challenges.

• Hierarchical Superiors
If your persona has hierarchical superiors, they'll receive different directives. Furthermore, depending on which department they report to, their needs may vary.

• Different Collaborators
Identifying the different teams your persona works with is important for better understanding who might be influencers or, conversely, obstacles.

Psychological aspects of your personas

The goal here is to identify your persona's psychological profile and different decision-making biases. You need to try understanding how your persona thinks and acts to adopt the right approach. A tip to help you: the SONCAS technique for salespeople to identify your persona's psychological profile.

Behavioral habits of your personas

Your personas' typical day

Understanding your persona's typical day is important for two reasons:

1. First, you'll know when you can communicate with your target. For example, by knowing your target customers' transportation methods, you can build a content strategy adapted to their lifestyle.

2. Second, you can identify which devices (computer, phone, tablet) and communication channels (social media, emails, blog, website) your persona uses. These should allow for effective information transmission.

Taking into account all the characteristics mentioned above, you can establish your persona's typical day.

Your buyer personas' professional interests

These professional interests will help you identify other contact points with your persona and other challenges. This will help generate content type ideas and other ways to reach your target.

Example: Your persona might attend professional trade shows to gather information about their field and/or stay informed about new developments. You'd benefit from communicating your event to them and creating content related to what they're looking for.

Your buyer personas' alternatives

During exchanges and conversations you might have with your target, you should try to answer this question: how does your target solve their problem today? Every problem encountered can be solved in multiple ways and often has been for a long time. We generally start from something existing to bring a more innovative version to answer the need in question.

Your buyer personas' journey

Starting point: your persona's challenge

We often confuse two concepts:

• The need: I need a drill

• The challenge: Mount my kitchen furniture

These are two very different things, and if we focus on the drill, we miss our business opportunity. Your business is the challenge. Your persona just moved in as a homeowner in their new house and wants to redo the kitchen. For that, they need a drill AND/OR a kitchen designer AND/OR an installation craftsman AND/OR a course on how to install a kitchen when you're a beginner.

If you often go to Home Depot, you'll see they don't just offer the drill—and that makes all the difference.

Transition stage: the pain point

The pain point is closely linked to the challenge, but it's this pain point that will give you the angle to convert your target once the challenge is determined. If we take the previous example, we see that from one challenge can flow several angles.

It's because you know your target that you know the young man's pain point is his lack of experience in accomplishing the kitchen setup (young, first house, small renovation budget).

Conversely, if your persona had been a forty-something father of 3 children, senior executive in banking, moving to his third custom-built house, his challenge remains installing his kitchen, but his pain point is probably lack of time.

Final phase: the moment of truth

The moment of truth corresponds to when your persona decides to take action. Your persona is aware of their different needs and challenges. You've managed to define their pain point, but they'll only take action if there's a triggering element.

We'll take the example of the young man moving into his house:

• Challenge: renovations in his house and wants to install a new kitchen

• Pain points: lack of experience and doesn't have the budget to have it done professionally

• Moment of truth: He's moving next week—time to get started

How to use your buyer personas?

To create relevant content

Your personas help you define your customers': challenges, fears, obstacles, objectives, interests, reassurance elements... Through your content, you'll be able to address these different points. You can then adapt your messaging, vocabulary, and formats based on your personas to nurture them and convince them to make a purchase!

To adapt your communication

By determining your personas, you can design a coherent and effective editorial line. You need to identify topics that show your legitimacy and expertise, while selecting communication channels and platforms that will be best adapted to your target based on your persona. And to boost your visibility, you should be able to determine when to publish them thanks to your schedule established based on the persona data you've collected.

To understand your customers' purchase process

Identifying your personas will allow you to understand their purchase process. You can improve their journey, boost your marketing funnel, and thus increase your conversion rate. You need to understand your customers' objectives and needs to reach them, and this necessarily involves implementing buyer personas.