Understanding Your Audience: How To Create A Buyer Persona

by Adrienne Anes

​When it comes to creating a marketing and PR plan, always remember this: you are what you publish. Many times organizations and businesses aim to sell their products and services without really focusing on answering consumers’ needs. Companies must put their products aside and pay close attention to their buyers to see what they want, what kind of people they are and the list goes on. A business’ buyers are their target audience. In order to appeal to them and make the company successful, they must create a buyer persona: a fictional representation of an ideal customer for the company based on data and research.

A buyer persona might include:

1. Background: This may contain information like hobbies, interests, education, work and where they live. Companies can also collect data from sources like surveys to find out customer demographics.
2. Online Behaviors: Web analytics like Google Analytics help businesses easily track who is viewing, as well as what channels they use most to access their company and audience engagement. By using web analytics, they can simply look at data to help them create the perfect buyer persona.
3. Demographics: This can include information such as gender, age, whether or not they live alone, salary and marital status.

​Buyer personas are crucial tools for companies. They answer the who, what, when, where, how and why when it comes to appealing to the right customers. Now next time a company plans on devising strategies, they need to create a detailed buyer persona because it changes the game for all businesses when it comes to marketing and public relations.

The company known as The Longhairs (https://thelonghairs.us/) acts as great example of a website that creates the perfect buyer persona. This site provides services, products and support for the community of men with long hair.

​For more information on how to create a buyer persona, HubSpot offers a free persona template. ​