You might know that there are real people on the other side of marketing. However, have you really realized it? These people have specific needs and desires, which you are obliged to be aware of to intend a marketing shot in the right direction. Do not think of your target audience as something abstract. It’s alive!

In this article, we will discuss why a customer persona is so essential for marketers and entrepreneurs. Get ready to dive deep into the best marketing tips and practices that will help you build a realistic image of your target audience. Here I will consider the following key points such as:

• What is a buyer persona? Why should you consider “negative” buyers, too?
• The main persona elements
• The best tips to create a list of personas to personalize your marketing
• How to use a buyer persona in marketing?
• Excellent persona examples and free persona templates.

Let’s start!

A buyer persona is a sketch of your perfect customer. The primary persona elements usually include demographics, behavioral patterns, interests, goals, and other information that gives you an in-depth understanding of the target audience. It can even describe the buyer’s traits and habits.

A buyer persona contains all the data needed to build successful advertising campaigns, craft the marketing messages that will convert, and customize marketing to the needs and concerns of different targeted groups. A buyer persona will help you humanize a marketing strategy and make a business step closer to success.

A coin has an opposite side – a “negative” buyer persona

Whereas a buyer persona is the generalized image of your buyers, then a “negative” persona means people who seem to be prospective buyers, but actually, are not due to unobvious factors and should be excluded from your targeted list. A “negative” persona includes a set of characteristics that make people who align with almost all perfect customer parameters not interested in your product or services.

For example, your prospective customers are women having kids, however, your product covers only those under 35 years old. In this case, age has become the exclusive factor defining a “negative persona.” Such people can be eventually targeted in the PPC campaigns.

Thus, a “negative” buyer persona research can be particularly helpful in terms of audience restrictions and saving a marketing budget. Create a list of personas according to different parameters that make them irrelevant for your email campaigns or advertising.

If you did not research a buyer persona, you would never learn that your audience uses slang or emojis, which you can use in marketing to start communicating with customers in their language. It adds a pinch of a specific style to your marketing messages and makes them well-understood by the audience.

2. Personalize your marketing campaigns

You can segment a target audience into more specific groups, create a list of personas, and personalize your marketing for them. For example, you can craft different messages based on what you know about your personas and email them to the segments of your audience.

3. Achieve a lower cost-per-customer excluding “negative” personas

You can boost the productivity of marketing campaigns by excluding “bad” customers from a targeted list. It helps cut an advertising budget and make email marketing work more efficiently after you segmented your “negative personas” from a contact list.

4. Build a customer journey map

You can pair a user journey map with a customer persona to define the points of the weakest user resistance. This approach allows you to find out what a person would prefer in a user journey. It will also help you turn a user “who is looking for something” into a user “who is ready to make a purchase.”

Usually, a buyer persona template consists of three parts: personal parameters (such as gender, age, etc.), work-related data (like a job title, company), and a more descriptive part (includes the buyer’s objectives, values, and pain-points).

This is the core information that can be completed with persona elements such as primary sources of information, a description of one day from the persona’s life, etc. This free persona template suggested by Buffer is an excellent example.

Personal parameters

Using Google Analytics, Facebook Audience Insights, or any other marketing analytics tools, you can extract valuable information about people who interact with your brand. Try to find the answers to the following questions:

1. What is the customer’s age?
2. What is the buyer’s gender?
3. What is the persona’s marital status?
4. Does a buyer have kids?
5. Does a customer have pets?
6. What are the buyer’s interests and hobbies?
7. What is the buyer’s average income?
8. Where does a customer live? Country? City? In an urban, suburban or rural area?
9. Which social networks does a customer use?
10. What books or movies does a buyer like?
11. Which websites does a persona visit the most often?
12. Which means of communication does a buyer prefer to use?
13. What purchases does a buyer usually make?

All this data allows you to make the right conclusions on the customer’s lifestyle, values, mentality, mindset, etc. – what is paramount information needed to build a viable marketing strategy. Here you can see one of the persona examples created by HubSpot.

Work-related data

If I asked you who you were, you would answer something like, “I am [name], a [man/woman], [x] years old. I am a [profession].” After two parameters that define us as humans, the next one we would mention was a job title.