In the last blog post, I talked about the importance of identifying your ideal client and using a buyer persona to help attract more qualified leads to your business. A buyer persona helps you clarify your ideal client’s problems and define how your product or service can help solve those problems.
In today’s post, I’m going to outline the five essential traits of a basic buyer persona so you can create better content to attract more clients online. It’s easy to get started, and actually kind of fun.
The 5 Buyer Persona Traits
Creating a buyer persona is pretty easy, all you need is to answer some key questions to begin.
1. Gender
Is your ideal client male, female, or non-binary? Be specific and remember if you have more than one, create separate personas. Different people have different needs.
2. Name
Give your persona a memorable, catchy name. Work in the real estate space? Maybe the persona is a lady trying to sell her house on her own. You could call her, “FSBO Fiona”. This helps you easily remember your persona. Try to keep it relevant to your industry.
3. Age
Is your persona 18-24 or 40-55? An age range is just fine as certain groups will have different life stage needs.
4. Occupation
Stay-at-home mom or dad? Doctor? Retail employee? This information plays into someone’s needs as well, so don’t leave it out.
5. Marital Status
A widower, married, partnered and single person may all have unique needs that should be considered when creating a persona.
And that’s all you need to get started. From here, you can add additional information to your buyer persona to further flesh out their story: What social media channels do they use? What do they do for fun? And so on. These details help you get inside the head of your ideal client and understand what problems they experience from their perspective. The marketing content you create should speak to how your product or service helps this persona to solve those problems.
A Buyer Persona Example: “Fizzbo Fiona”
“Fizzbo Fiona” in the flesh. (not really)
Using the five traits mentioned above, let’s put together a buyer persona. This example is for a Real Estate Agent looking to get more clients online:
- Gender: Female
- Name: “FSBO Fiona” Let’s call her “Fizzbo Fiona” to make it even more memorable
- Age: 35-45 years old
- Occupation: Registered Nurse
- Marital Status: Married w/ two kids
From this, I can flesh out “Fizzbo Fiona’s” story even further: Fizzbo Fiona is a 35-year-old registered nurse who’s married with two children. Her kids are getting older and bigger so her current home is starting to feel cramped. She and her husband have decided it’s time to start looking at a bigger home.
However, she wants her and her husband to sell their home themselves after Fiona was burned by her last real estate agent. She had a negative experience when buying her current home and doesn’t want a repeat performance.
Even though she and her husband’s schedules already make their free time minimal, she thinks they can make it work, sell their home themselves, and keep more money from the sale.
For a real estate agent, this is a lot of good information about the types of problems “Fizzbo Fiona” will experience, such as:
- Understanding the legal requirements of listing a home in her state
- Finding the time to list, market, and show her home while working full-time
- How to correctly price her home to generate the most viewings and offers
From these three items, a real estate agent could create the following blog posts addressing each problem:
- Thinking of listing a home yourself in North Carolina? Know the laws.
- What does it take to list a home yourself? Maybe more than you think.
- Did you list your home for too much? That may be why no one wants it.
Crafting great blog posts is going to be important, but we’ll cover that in another post.
A Freebie to Help You
To make it even easier to develop your buyer persona, I’ve put together a quick and easy-to-use “Buyer Persona Worksheet” that will guide you through the process. The PDF can be printed and filled out old-school style or with your favorite PDF reader.
When finished, you’ll have a great buyer persona (or several) you can start working with to create targeted content to attract more qualified clients online. And remember, the more detail you include, the more insight you’ll have about how your product or service can help.
In our third and final blog post in this series, we’ll look at some great examples of buyer personas, how they were used to create a marketing strategy, and the next steps you can take to get more clients to grow your business.
Questions or comments? I’d love to hear from you! Drop a comment below or shoot me an email at joe@pyrpawmarketing.com.