Creating Buyer Personas for Your B2C Company

Welcome! We’re excited for you to create buyer personas and take your business to the next level.

Whether you’re creating a new business, starting a marketing strategy for the first time, or revising your marketing strategy, you’re in the right place. Buyer personas are a great tool to get to know your audience and prospects before you plan your marketing strategy. 

Buyer personas impact all aspects of your marketing strategy. In email campaigns, they can improve open rate by 2x and click-through-rate by 5x. Behaviorally-targeted ads? Twice as effective as non-targeted ads. Overall, customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that aren’t customer-centric. All of these happen because of buyer personas.

If you’re already implementing a strategy and haven’t developed personas yet, there’s no better time than right now to arm yourself with this knowledge. Create messaging, offers, and products that directly speak to the wants and needs of your primary customer segments. Laser-focus your marketing with personas guiding your strategy.

If you have existing buyer personas, consider why they didn’t succeed. How can you update them to make sure your team uses them in their daily work?

No matter your starting point, the first step is identifying your goal and key questions.

Before you jump into buyer persona development, define their specific purpose and objectives. What do you want your personas to achieve?

If you skip this step, you will cast your personas aside. This is the first step to your marketing strategy as a whole; your personas will answer key questions about your customers’ behaviors, motivations, and preferences.

SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. Making your goals SMART allows you to have an attainable goal that will come to fruition with planned efforts. 

Create the overarching goal of your marketing strategy, and check it against the SMART framework. If you’re missing aspects, rewrite your goal so it hits all five marks.

The most valuable information comes from interviews, post-purchase surveys, and customer segmentation.

Competitor and industry research can provide extremely valuable insights to help develop B2C customer personas when you have limited existing customer data. While original customer insights are ideal, thorough research of competitors and overall industry dynamics provides an excellent starting point for developing reasonably accurate B2C personas when lacking internal data.

It’s easy to say “do your research.” But where do you actually start? Utilize competitor analysis, industry trends, and social media to inform your buyer personas.

You shouldn’t base everything you do on your competitors. That said, analyzing their strategies, products, sales, and marketing tactics can inspire fresh ideas that you (and your competitor) didn’t consider. 

In 2023, 41% of marketers and business owners said that competitor analysis influenced the success of their strategy. Explore who your competitors’ customers are to get a better sense of who yours might be. Examine how your competitors interact with those customers. What audiences are they connecting with most? Can you identify which pieces of content were designed for which audiences?

Scroll through your competitors’ social media accounts to see how their content targets specific audiences. How can you understand their strategy to develop yours?

If you aren’t paying attention, trends can pass over you without a trace. A trend’s lifespan is short, so staying in-the-know about them is essential to reaching your audiences. What trends align with which types of customers? 

To figure out what’s trending, think of topics you commonly discuss with your customers. In this example, let’s say your customer is interested in fast fashion. Start with a Google search. What are the most recent conversations about fast fashion? Read news stories and articles about developments in the fashion industry against fast fashion.

Need more information? Search on social media. This is a great opportunity to see what people think about the topic. News stories are objective, but people love to use social media to share their personal thoughts.

Model persona behaviors and paths-to-purchase based on industry norms and develop personas reflective of emerging needs and preferences fueling industry growth.

Regardless if your audience contains 10 people or hundreds, you can gain a strong understanding of your business through their eyes. This, in turn, will inform your buyer personas. Don’t worry if you don’t have an existing customer database. Skip to step 4!

A customer segment is a cluster of customers with similar characteristics and demands. By putting your existing customers into these buckets, you gain a better understanding of who your audience currently is. 

Think about it this way: you want to send information about a new product to your Gen Z audience. It wouldn’t make sense to send that targeted information to all of your customers.

But, if Jane is one of your customers and you don’t have any other information about her, you may not know what generation she belongs to. Customer segmentation prevents this problem and helps you understand what audiences you are and aren’t appealing to.

To segment your current audience, fill in our customer segmentation template. When you finish entering all relevant information, use the sheet to identify similarities amongst your audience.

56% of consumers think businesses need to have a deeper understanding of consumer needs, and 51% think brands send too much irrelevant content. Conduct interviews and focus groups with customers and prospects. Both of these qualitative research methods will provide insight into how your business is doing well, how it can improve, and what types of customers are using or considering your products.

Say you host an interview with John, a 65-year-old man who purchased golf clubs from your business. John loves his golf clubs, but he feels his shopping experience could have been better. John can now provide you his opinion, making him feel involved, and you have new insight on necessary improvements for your business.

Additionally, you now have more information about John. John is retired, in his 60s, and he loves golf. If you use John’s information for a buyer persona, you can now create new products that would appeal to his needs. 

Ask more questions about your customer’s characteristics and psychographics. What is their occupation? What is their level of education? What are their interests? The goal is to blend demographic questions with deeper psychographic and behavioral insights into how B2C customers like to shop, what motivates them, and what they value. This builds a 360-degree view of the customer behind the persona.

Here are a few example questions to include:

• What is your age, location, household income, education level, and occupation?
• What does a typical day look like for you?
• How do you like to spend your free time? What hobbies and interests do you have?
• What values and causes are important to you?
• How do you make purchasing decisions for [product/service category]?
• Do you like to shop online, in stores, or a mix? Why?
• How much research do you do before making a purchase? What sources do you rely on?
• What factors most influence your final purchase decision? Quality, price, reviews, brand reputation?
• When you have a bad experience with a brand, what actions do you take? Stop buying, complain, leave reviews?
• What emotions do you want to experience when purchasing [product/service]? Fun, indulgence, ease?
• What outcomes do you hope to achieve when you buy [product/service]?
• What problems or pain points do you experience with current [product/service] options?
• How could a company improve your overall purchasing experience?

Post-purchase surveys are valuable to your business as a whole. They help you use real customer feedback to improve your business. Post-purchase surveys give B2C companies crucial customer intelligence to optimize interactions, increase repeat purchases, promote loyalty, and drive growth. The feedback loop supports customer-centric brands.

When it comes to buyer personas, post-purchase surveys will inform their development. Include questions in your survey that give you qualitative and quantitative answers, such as:

• Why did you decide to purchase this product or service?
• Did you consider buying any competitors’ products or services before choosing this one?
• How long did you consider purchasing our product or service before you made your decision?
• Have you purchased this product or service in the past? How many times?
• How would you rate your buying experience on a scale of 1 to 10?

Develop questions that will give you more information about your audiences and their opinions of your business and products.

Now that your background knowledge is strong, it’s time to develop your buyer personas. Synthesize your insights into two to four robust personas. Include details like their given name, a photo, demographics, psychographics, behaviors, goals, pain points, and quotes.

Don’t take this step all on your own. Use our dynamic buyer persona template to brainstorm what your personas will look like.

Remember that you can go back and change your personas as you see fit. Don’t fret if you don’t have all of the answers; with further research and better understanding of your audience, you will be able to refine your personas. 

With the information you brainstormed in the last step, create a finalized document for each persona for easy reference across teams.

Our buyer persona template has a place for you to complete these fact sheets. Summarize their interests, goals, challenges, appropriate messaging, conversation highlights, and how they interact with different channels. 

Review your finished personas with sales, marketing, and product teams to finalize and gain alignment within your business. This step is important to make sure your team is all on the same page and the personas are accurate.

With other teams’ feedback, revise your personas for accuracy.

Congratulations! Your buyer personas are complete! But the work isn’t over yet.

It’s time to start applying your buyer personas to your strategy, messaging, product features, and customer service applications.

Develop strategies while considering your buyer personas. How? Find part two of our comprehensive guide on our blog.

Use your buyer personas to form a strong marketing strategy. Send us a message to get started.