How To Create A Buyer Persona

What Is A Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional profile of your ideal customer made up from market research, customer data and your knowledge of the industry and your business. In short, they are your ideal customer. They are the people that you would love to walk through the door of hair or beauty salon.

Creating a buyer persona is a way to establish a whole identity for your customers. They have a name, interests, age, location, relationship status as well as hobbies and interests. Obviously your customers are unique and different in many ways, a buyer’s persona is a way to generalise them so that you can focus on what you want to say to your customers and how you promote your small business.

Why Are Buyer Personas Important?

Buyer personas are important because it gives a foundation to your customer base. They are at the heart of the marketing strategy. Everything that you do in marketing will stem from what you establish in your buyer persona. Who will you talk to? How will you you talk to them? Which channel will you use? What will you say? These are all questions that can be answered by creating a buyer persona that is specific to your small business. 

Creating a buyer persona profile is vital for your digital marketing activities. It’s a way to compile the data you have on your customer base so that you can decide which social channels to use, your tone of voice, search marketing as well as what to say in your emails and how often you should send them. 

Creating a buyer persona doesn’t just help with your target audience for digital marketing. It can help with all of marketing and sales as well as the products and services you want to provide. You may have more than one buyer persona depending on how many products and services you offer. Buyer personas are quite easy to create and a great foundation for defining the digital audience for your small business and starting your digital marketing campaign.

In short, buyer personas allow you to understand your customers (and potential customers) better. Below we show you how to find your first buyer persona and how to use it. 

How To Create a Buyer Persona

It does take a little bit of time to create buyer personas for your small business, but that’s no bad thing. It’s important to take a step back to really think about who your customers are and what you want to say to them. Buyer persona research will pay dividends in the future and will ensure both you and your team have a clear, considered and attractive message to improve conversions. 

Below we give you some questions to answer about your buyer persona. There are no wrong or right answers as this is unique to your business. Your personas may not look like your competitor’s, although there will probably be some overlap. 

You may not have all the answers here and that’s OK. This is where your educated guess comes in or something you can add once you have more information. It’s also useful to look at the data you already have on your customers as well as any industry research. The focus here is who YOU want to attract so that you can give the best service possible. 

Personal Information

• How old are they?
• Where do they live? 
• What is there relationship status?
• Do they have children?
• Did they go to university? 
• What did they study?
• Which industry do they work in? 

Activities

• Do they use social media?
• Which publications/news outlets do they read?
• Where do they shop?
• What kind of programmes do they watch? e.g. films / documentaries / soaps / reality TV
• Where do they go on holiday?
• How do they spend their social time?

Challenges

• What kind of challenges do they face day to day?
• What kind of challenges do they face long term?
• How can your business help them?

Goals

• What do they hope to achieve?
• How can your business help them?
• What are they aiming for?
• What motivates them?

Would you like additional tips and visual aids? Download our comprehensive free buyer persona guide here!

How To Use Your Buyer Persona

What do you do after collecting your data? This is where you use the information to create an identity. It may be that one buyer persona doesn’t fit into all the products and services you have. That is completely normal but you should find that the information you have creates some generalisations about who you are selling to. It may be busy working mums or career-focused young professionals, either way, you can begin to paint a picture of who your customers are.

Now that you have a buyer profile (or profiles) you can start to focus your marketing efforts to attract those people. When looking at your digital marketing strategy, refer to your buyer persona to decide what to do. For example, if you’re targeting young professionals then you may want to do your social posts during commuting hours. Or if you’re targeting at home mums, then you may want your fitness class to be at a time convenient for them such as after the school run. 

You can start planning all your content, promotions and advertising by referring back to your personas to establish the best channels for success. Remember that you can always add to your buyer persona profiles as you gather more information and as your business grows. If your business begins to offer more services or products, you may need to create new personas to reflect this. 

Explore our Hair & Beauty page for more information on how Green Shoot Marketing can create your buyer persona and help your small salon business grow.