BUILD YOUR OWN BUYER PERSONA (FREE TEMPLATE)

Develop a targeted marketing message with a buyer persona template

Think about the best marketing campaigns that have worked on you. Effective targeted messaging makes you feel understood. It’s like they know what your needs, aspirations, and problems are. And then align their product or service with that knowledge. 

That’s all the result of creating buyer personas that help you understand your target customer.

A buyer persona helps you understand the needs of your current and potential customers. When you know your target audience, you can send the right message to the right group of people.

Your target audience isn’t just one audience. It’s a group of people interested in your business for different reasons. The ability to send messages that target each of those reasons is critical for creating a successful marketing campaign. Your product or service can help different types of customers, so you need a way to service each one. 

When you identify the type of customer you need to target, you can create effective, targeted messages that produce conversions across your marketing efforts.

If you’re a business owner or part of a marketing team, one of the first marketing strategies you should implement is buyer or audience personas. 

Download this free template (+3 examples) as a guide to identify your ideal buyers and craft effective, targeted messages that lead to conversion.

What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is a fictional person who represents a company’s ideal customer based on your current customer’s data or extensive market research. 

These customer personas can help you understand the needs of each audience segment you serve and get the right message in front of the right group of people. Each buyer or user persona has a catchy fictional name (like “Mindy the Mom”) to help personify who your customers could be in real life. 

Think about each product or service you offer and the type of person who would be a good fit for each one. Have them in mind yet? Great! We’ll go through what makes up a good buyer persona.

Why is a buyer persona important?

A buyer persona is important because it helps you get to know your audience. That understanding will steer your marketing in the right direction to help you connect with your target market.

Your messaging, sales materials, and overall strategy should all be outcomes of creating a buyer persona because it will allow you to speak directly to their interests, goals, and problems.

When you can align the right product with the right person, that’s where the magic of marketing truly happens.

The buyer persona is a great resource to help:

• Determine your compelling message. You have a product or service that offers great benefits. You’re passionate about it and want to shout it from the rooftops! Your marketing message should show that you’re confident in what you can deliver and make people feel excited—so much so that it makes them take immediate action.
• Share customer testimonials. To help illustrate these compelling benefits, offer an example or two of how you’ve delighted other customers and improved the customer experience.
• Discover the most relevant marketing channel. When considering successful marketing campaign elements, think about the delivery method. You’ve crafted an amazing message, and now it’s time to get it out into the world on the most relevant channel.
• Organize previous marketing campaign performance data. Start with what you know about your audience and what has worked well in the past. If you’ve had consistent success launching your campaigns through a particular channel, whether it’s email, online advertising, social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter, or even snail mail, leverage what works.
• Understand your audience’s preferred communication. This is one of the most overlooked steps in the process of planning a marketing campaign, but it’s certainly the most important. Think about your target audience and where you can reach them most effectively. Where are people most actively engaging with you?

What should be in a persona template?

Everything you need to get a solid snapshot of who your target customer is — and how your entire company can help them. Here are the 4 parts that should be included in a persona template.

1. Basic demographic data

Your persona template should at the very least have basic information like:

• Persona’s name
• Age, gender, location
• Job title
• Hobbies and interests
• Your company name and product/service

The goal here is the get a solid foundation and quick intro of who they are. The persona’s name is a clever nickname that describes the audience. For mom persona, you could call them “Mindy the Mom.” Or, for tech enthusiasts, you might name them “Techie Tom.” 

2. Descriptive words

Using a few words to give your persona personality traits can help with the type of messaging that will matter to them the most. You can add simple descriptive words like creative, active, introverted, or adventurous.

3. Daily challenges and goals

What is your persona facing in their day-to-day life? What obstacles are in the way of them being successful or comfortable? What frustrating questions do they have to ask while working or living life? What’s their main goal they’re trying to achieve, and what result would make them happy? Putting these goals and challenges into your template will help you position your product/service to help with their specific needs.

4. Objections and purchase criteria

Knowing what makes this particular persona uncertain about buying products or services can really help you set up pricing and packages that meet their needs. And knowing the mental checklist that a persona will go through before purchasing can help you set up promotions that drive more sales. For example, if cost isn’t a factor for “Senior Exec Steve,” your promotions will likely focus on quality and design, with cost being a secondary mention.

How do you do buyer persona research?

There are plenty of ways to collect important data that’ll you need to put together a useful buyer persona. A lot of it will depend on what your business can offer and what capabilities you have on your marketing team. We’ll outline a few ways you can do research that ranges from passive online sources to in-person interviews.

Collect data from interviews

If you’re a B2B company, interviewing reps in your sales teams can be a great source to understand your persona’s daily challenges. These people are directly talking to customers and will have a treasure trove of information that can help you understand what goes through customers’ purchasing decisions.

Surveys are also a great way to interview your customers. This will help you find patterns that you can use to put in the descriptive words section of your templates.

Online research strategies

You can gather a plethora of information from where your target audience hangs out the most online. Go to online forums where people with common interests and behaviors go to share their thoughts and opinions. For example, you might want to visit Mom Facebook groups for the “Mindy the Mom” persona. 

Popular industry blogs are useful for understanding the marketing messaging that resonates with your persona. This is where you can pick the lingo and marketing messages that only your persona would understand. You might find “Technie Tom” reading and commenting on popular gadget and tech review sites.

How do I create a buyer persona?

When you create a buyer persona, you want to have a good understanding of what product or service will be the single focus of your marketing campaign. This will be the primary solution that focuses on the needs of your persona. Then you can create messaging that highlights those needs.

Here’s how to create a buyer persona:

• Provide a memorable persona name and refer to them as a real person
• Use customer data to identify the key demographics of your persona
• Describe your buyer’s interests, skills, behaviors, and overall lifestyle
• Determine what problems and daily challenges your persona faces
• Figure out what would make your buyer uncertain about purchasing
• Decide what will drive your ideal buyer to make a purchase
• Understand the primary goal or end result your buyer is trying to achieve
  

Buyer persona template examples 

How do I use buyer personas in marketing?

You did all the research and pulled together all the data for your target buyer personas, but how do you use it? And how might this determine the different marketing channels you should use for your marketing campaigns?

Let’s say in your research you discovered that your current and prospective customers are between the ages of 18 and 24. Then you would likely want to message on social media using specifically Instagram and Snapchat to reach them.

But if your research showed that your target market is between the ages of 30 and 49, you might want to focus your marketing efforts on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Some other information your buyer persona will help you with are:

• What improvements you should make to your product or service
• How you should be messaging the benefits of your product or service
• What channels you should be using to reach your ideal customer
• How to overcome objections or concerns your buyers might have prior to purchasing
• Why someone would need or want your offering

That’s all the work that goes into creating a buyer persona that’ll make your potential customers feel like you just “get” them. If you’re looking to get started with buyer personas for your business, you don’t need to make a template from scratch. We made one for you—download the free buyer persona template.