04. Buyer Persona

A buyer persona is fictional character created to represent a user type that will typically be the ones who interact with your brand. The CEO or the CFO. The Sustainability Officer or Innovation Manager.

In my case, for Series A companies, it's the communications/marketing manager. For smaller companies, it's the CEO/CMO.

They're the one who you'll actually have to target. The ones who'll be the point of contact in the buying cycle. By undertaking research, it's possible to find out who they are and what kind of language they use. 

How to define a persona?

Your buyer personas need to be based on real-world data, not gut instinct. I suggest asking five companies that you want to work about their buying process. Learn about your audience, from them! Some ways which you can define a buyer persona are:

• What are their job responsibilities? 

• What is their age & position at the company?

• What industries are they present in? 

• What are they interested in outside of work?

• What is their annual revenue? 

• What level of experience do they have?

•  What are their goals?

• What are their challenges?

• What are their favourite brands?

Define their challenges and jobs to be done

The next step of the process is to ask yourself "What are the challenges they face and how does your product or service solve that problem?" Some possible answers could be:

• What are their major pain points that drive them towards your solution or product?

• What are their career/life goals? For instance, if they're an entrepreneur, it might be getting VC funding or going to IPO, whereas an employee might care more about a promotion.

• What are their business goals? 

How can you find out more about your buyer persona?

• Google research. How would my customers find me online? What are they searching for? 

• Ecosystem. Create a list of all the solutions which your target audience may already be using. How are they communicating? Look at your competitors and see whom they’ve partnered with. Analyse their ecosystem and see if you can find any similar companies to strike up a conversation with.

• Ask them. Ask your potential target audiences where they get their information, what publications they read and what would convince them to work with you over someone else.

• SEO research. Write a list of your keywords. What are your customers are using to search for your product? Find out with a product like SEMRush or Ubersuggest.

Compile the research

Gather all of your research and start looking for common characteristics. Give your buyer persona a name, a job title, a home, and other defining characteristics. They should seem like a real person.

For example, if your selling impact measurement technology to mid-size NGOs, your target audience might be COOs. They may all well be at the end of their career and working with NGOs after a for-profit career. Or potentially they've spent their entire career in the non-profit sector. Knowing these differences is important. 

Either way, they also might like to go camping regularly, all own electric vehicles, and have limited experience with impact measurement. Based on research, you’ll give them representative characteristics that make them a real person:

• More likely to be a woman

• She is 50 years old

• She has grown up kids

• She lives in London

• She works as a COO or CCO

• She owns an EV

• She likes to camp in Devon

• She has a few years left in her career and wants to set the organization up for success

• She doesn't have much experience measuring impact

• She is technology-focused

Give them a name

Then the next step is to give them a name. Let's call her Electric Lizzie. 

The process of creating a buyer persona is important for the next step in brand building — Strategic Messaging — because it's Electric Lizzie's pain points we're going to be solving.

It will also save a lot of time and money if and when you begin to use paid advertising, you already know a lot about the habits of the person who will be in charge of buying your product.