Creating Buyer Personas for Your Target Audience

As a marketer, you know how important it is to know your audience like the back of your hand (or perhaps more accurately, like the contents of the half-a-dozen spreadsheets you use on a daily basis). You know how to analyze data from Google Analytics and other tools to find out where your customers are and how they are finding you. But how do you bridge the gap between learning basic information about your target audience and actually appealing to their needs?

Creating buyer personas is the answer.

The purpose of creating a buyer persona

What is a buyer personas are hyper-specific profiles of your brand’s target customers. Understanding a buyer persona inside and out—from where they live and what age they are to how they spend their time and money—means you can better understand your audience and their needs. This is crucial for building brand trust, which, according to a 2021 report from Edelman, 88 percent of customers cite as one of the key factors they consider when deciding what brands to buy or use.

A great example of a brand that has totally nailed down its target audience is You Need A Budget, AKA YNAB, a customizable personal budgeting software. Their website features a purely educational hub for building better habits around money, including the emotional side of money—tailoring content for an audience who clearly cares about creating a stable future for themselves.

And when competitor Intuit announced it was shutting down the hugely popular budgeting app Mint in late 2023, YNAB was able to identify a new niche audience. Their content guides create a clear solution for budgeters now struggling to replace a system they’d likely relied on for years.

Both B2B and B2C buyer personas allow you to humanize your marketing strategy and thus create content that feels tailor-made for your target audience, in turn making them trust you. The tricky part comes with sifting through the ample data at your disposal to include only information that actually matters for your purposes.

For instance, if you were to build out a B2B buyer persona for bookkeeping software, you don’t really need to know how your target audience spends their free time. Your focus would be almost entirely on their job functions and workplace pain points. But a B2C buyer persona for a women’s activewear brand would be a different story. Knowing how that audience spends their free time would be critical to creating a buyer persona that accurately reflects who you’re marketing to.

Building specific, data-driven buyer personas

So, where do you look to find out information about your target audience to create a buyer persona? Here are three steps to get you started:

Practice “social listening”

Social listening is a unique form of market research that involves monitoring conversations about your brand, products, or services to see how customers are organically talking about your brand online. While this isn’t quite as simple as setting up a Google Alert, media analytics tools like Hootsuite and Brandwatch can make this a lot easier than constantly searching your company’s name on TikTok.

Online forums like Reddit, Facebook groups, and LinkedIn groups are also great places to see what customers are saying about your own products or your competitors—and collect tons of useful data while you’re at it. For instance, someone putting together buyer personas for a project management software would get a lot of useful information from this conversation, including what real-world customers have to say about certain apps’ shortcomings. Noting the negatives, not just the positives, can give content marketers and product teams ideas for how to address their clients’ pain points.

Use social media insights

Whether you’re using native app analytics or a third-party tool, don’t just look at your audience demographics to create your personas; analyze your top-performing content that customers have engaged with the most. Are you noticing any patterns? Raw data might tell you that your customers are 35-44 and live in the Pacific Northwest, but more detailed analytics could tell you that they care about making environmentally friendly decisions.

Patagonia is a go-to example of a brand that understands its target audience inside and out. One of their most popular recent Instagram reels is a clip about their efforts to fight overconsumption, invest in quality, and encourage customers to buy less. It sounds counterintuitive—why would a brand want to encourage customers to buy fewer things? But environmentalism has always been at the core of Patagonia’s brand ethos, and it knows its client base is full of like-minded outdoors-people. Keeping that ethos at the core of their content ensures that when their ecologically mindful target audience inevitably needs to purchase something for their next adventure, they might as well buy it from Patagonia.

Involve your client-facing teammates

Finally, who should be involved in creating your buyer personas? Especially on smaller teams, the task of creating buyer personas likely falls to content marketers, but that doesn’t mean creating them from a vacuum. Because it doesn’t matter what industry you work in—customer feedback is golden in curating the perfect buyer persona. That means picking the brains of your sales team, customer service reps, or anyone else in a client-facing position. These are people who directly deal with customer issues every day; they’ll be able to tell you the problems and pain points they see clients dealing with most often.

How to create a buyer persona template

Now that you’ve collected all of this data, it’s finally time to breathe life into your buyer personas! You can DIY your own template or use one of the options available online. The Buyer Persona Institute’s example and HubSpot’s Make My Persona tool are both great options.

You’ll want to make buyer personas that are as accurate to your audience as possible. Give them names, job titles, interests, and other characteristics that are relevant to marketing your product or service. If you can read their profile and think they could actually be one of your real-life customers, congratulations, you’ve done this part correctly!

Remember that your buyer personas should evolve over time—just like real people. As you develop your content strategy with your buyer personas at the center, continue analyzing your campaigns to assess whether they are resonating with your audience. Fine-tuning your buyer personas might take time, but the results from personalizing your content strategy can be more than worth it.

As the Content Strategist: FAQs about creating buyer personas

How often should buyer personas be updated to remain accurate and effective?

Buyer personas should be periodically reviewed and updated, especially when significant market shifts occur or customer behavior changes noticeably. Aim to reassess and refine your personas at least annually to ensure they remain aligned with your evolving audience.

Can buyer personas be applied to niche or specialized markets effectively?

Yes, buyer personas can be highly effective in niche markets, often providing even more targeted insights into the unique needs and preferences of specialized audiences. However, the process may require more in-depth research and a nuanced understanding of the particular market segment.

What role do qualitative insights play in crafting buyer personas, and how can they complement quantitative data?

Qualitative insights, such as customer interviews or focus groups, offer valuable context and a deeper understanding of quantitative data. They provide nuanced insights into customer motivations, pain points, and behaviors, enriching the overall accuracy and depth of your buyer personas.

If you’re overwhelmed with content strategy to-dos like creating buyer personas, consider expanding your team with Contently. Book a demo today!