How well do you know your ideal customer? Smart marketers and business owners know that clearly defining the ideal customer is the key to high conversions. A survey conducted by ITSMA showed that 90% of the companies that use buyer personas claim to understand their audience better than those that don’t.
But the question is: What does it take to create a buyer persona?
Using a buyer persona template is the easiest way to organize your research to create your own buyer persona.
Here’s a short selection of 8 easy-to-edit buyer persona templates you can edit, share and download with Visme. View more templates below:
In this guide, we’ll discuss how to create a buyer persona and share some customizable buyer persona templates to help you create one.
Table of Contents
- What Is a Buyer Persona?
- Why Should You Create Buyer Personas?
- How To Build A Buyer Persona In 5 Steps
- 15 Buyer Persona Templates You Can Use (+ Design Tips)
- Buyer Persona FAQs
What Is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a researched-based representation of your ideal customer who will be the most interested in your products or services. As a business, your products and services solve your customers’ problems and make their lives easier. You need to ensure that you only focus on selling your products and services to those who need them the most.
A buyer persona is used by businesses to better understand their customers’ needs and wants. Since lead generation requires tailoring marketing efforts toward the right people, a buyer persona is a crucial marketing tool.
For B2B companies, creating an ideal customer profile serves a similar purpose as creating a buyer persona, which is mostly applicable to B2C companies.
What Is a Buyer Persona Template?
A buyer persona template is a tool used by marketers and businesses to create a detailed and specific representation of their ideal customer. This framework helps you develop a clear understanding of your target audience, including their demographics, interests, behaviors, motivations and pain points.
A typical buyer persona template includes several key sections, such as:
- Personal background: This includes basic demographic information such as age, gender, income and education level.
- Job and company: This section outlines their job title, responsibilities and the type of company they work for.
- Goals and challenges: This section describes the buyer’s primary goals and challenges and what they are looking to achieve or solve with your product or service
- Buying behavior: This section explores how the buyer typically researches and evaluates products or services, as well as their decision-making process and criteria.
- Marketing messaging: This section outlines the key messages and value propositions that will resonate with the target customer and how they can be effectively communicated through marketing materials.
Here is an example of a one-page buyer persona template.
Customize this template and make it your own!Edit and Download
Why Should You Create Buyer Personas?
Now that you know what a buyer persona is, you’re probably wondering: why are buyer personas important?
Before discussing how to build a buyer persona, let’s understand why you should create buyer personas. Here are the top five benefits of creating a persona.
1. Better understanding of your ideal customer – Understand the needs and wants of your existing and prospective customers. Offer products, services, content and anything that adds value to your customers.
2. Increase conversions — This is the main goal of creating a buyer persona. Once you understand your customers, use those insights to improve reach, boost conversions, and subsequently increase your revenue.
3. Segmented marketing – Another benefit of understanding your ideal customer through a buyer persona is that you can segment your marketing campaigns. Create content around the topics your ideal customers want to learn more about.
3. Better quality leads – Use the information you collected about your prospects from your marketing campaigns and build better lead nurturing programs to improve lead quality for your business. Better quality leads mean better customers.
4. Synchronize your sales and marketing teams – Your marketing team knows which visitors have higher chances of converting into leads. Likewise, your sales team knows which leads have the highest value when converting. Creating a buyer persona helps your marketing and sales team get on the same page so they can get the best results.
5. Better product development – Identify and prioritize changes to your product based on what your customers need the most. However, the benefits are endless once you know your ideal customers.
How To Build A Buyer Persona In 5 Steps
Defining a buyer persona might seem like a daunting task. We’ve broken down the process of building a buyer persona into five manageable steps to make it easier for you.
Step 1: Involve Your Team
Persona building should be a collaborative process between marketing, sales and leadership. So, it would be best if you involved your team in the process.
For example, you can include your chief marketing officer, account executive, director of sales and content strategist so they can add their valuable insights.
However, getting everyone on the same page to create the buyer persona can be time-consuming and difficult.
Visme’s collaboration features help you involve anyone in the process, especially when you create a persona online. Invite users via a shareable link to view, edit or comment on the same design, tag collaborators in comments, reply to and resolve comments and more.
Watch our tutorial video to see this in action.
Furthermore, you can use Visme’s analytics tool to track views, clicks and other engagements on your template.
Step 2: Research Your Target Audience
Researching the target audience will help you create a realistic persona and find helpful insights about your existing customers. Here are three simple ways you can do this.
1. Analyze your existing customer base: If you already have a customer base, it’s always better to start from them. Communicate with them through social media, email and phone.
2. Analyze competitors: If you are just starting and have no customer base, you can start with your competitor’s customer base. Track them on social media and review platforms.
3. Conduct market research: Conduct market research on your industry to find unique information about people who can benefit from your product or service, even if they are not your customers yet.
Share important findings about your competitors and market using this stunning report template below.
Customize this template and make it your own!Edit and Download
Step 3: Narrow Down the Details
Look for the most common details in the research insights you have gathered. There might be a common issue that most people in your target audience are facing. Once you’ve identified the common issue, include it in your persona.
Here are some basic details you need to consider for the persona.
- Demographics: age, marital status, race, sex
- Behaviors: skills, interests, use of products and services, content consumption
- Geographic: the geographic area where most of your customers reside
- Challenges: customer pain points
- Interests: interests and hobbies
- Communication preferences: how often they want to communicate and why they open their emails
We’ve covered these details and more in our example buyer persona below.
Step 4: Segment Your Customers
Not everyone in your target audience can fit into the same group. For example, your audience may include people aged between 18 to 50. Their preferences will vary widely and the same sales and marketing approach may not work for everyone.
Depending on your requirements, divide your audience into groups and create different buyer personas for each of them. Here is an example of multiple buyer personas.
Customize this template and make it your own!Edit and Download
Step 5: Create Your Buyer Persona
Naming your persona and writing a story about it is the best way to think about it. Providing a name to the persona will help you feel like you are communicating with a real person. And creating a story will help you understand their pain points and how your products or services will solve their issues.
Here are a few best practices for writing a buyer persona.
- Provide a name to each of your buyer personas
- Add a profile picture to make them more personalized
- Write a story about their challenges
- Categorize data for each persona
- Include excerpts from interactions with your target audience
Working on multiple buyer personas? Here’s Visme to the rescue. Use Dynamic Fields to easily update information across multiple projects.
Here is another buyer persona template for your inspiration.
Customize this template and make it your own!Edit and Download
15 Buyer Persona Templates You Can Use (+ Design Tips)
We’ve covered how to build a buyer persona. But there’s no use creating buyer personas from scratch.
Here are 15 customer persona templates you can use. We’ve also included some design tips along the way to help you customize these templates.
1. Job Board Customer Persona Template
Let’s start with the job board customer persona template. If you have a job board or are planning to create one, this sample buyer persona is for you.
The crisp color combination of blue and white gives the buyer persona template a clean feeling. However, you can change the color combination using Visme to make it more personalized and stay on brand.
Here is how you can change the color of this template in Visme.
Customize this sample buyer persona to represent the ideal candidate for your job board and reach them through your marketing efforts.
Customize this template and make it your own!Edit and Download
2. Parent Customer Persona Template
Brands that focus on selling family-related products can use this template to create their buyer personas. In this template, the brand’s ideal customer is a working mother in her early thirties who wants to spend quality time with her husband and children.
Do you think your ideal customer shares the same story as this? Then use this buyer persona example to create yours.
Customize this template and make it your own!Edit and Download
3. Marketing Manager Customer Persona Template
Your buyer persona story can be about their job or profession. For example, it can be about their work environment, challenges at work and career goals. So, it will help you know the type of content they consume, their hobbies and interests, spending behavior and more.
If you are targeting marketing managers, research the similarities between your target customers and use this marketing persona template to jot them down.
Customize this template and make it your own!Edit and Download
4. Fitness Enthusiast Customer Persona Template
Is your business focused on health and fitness-related products and services? Use this client persona template to breathe life into the information your team enters into a spreadsheet. Not only does the template perfectly outline a fitness enthusiast’s personality traits, but it’s also aesthetically pleasing.
Customize this template and make it your own!Edit and Download
Significantly, the use of colorful shapes and the font hierarchy in the template makes it unique. But you can change them and use your brand colors and brand fonts for consistent branding.
5. Millennial Customer Persona Template
Like many businesses, you may be scratching your head trying to create a millennial buyer persona because they represent a diverse demographic. Therefore, you better not oversimplify or generalize their wants and expectations.
This millennial customer persona template has come to your rescue. Edit it and replace the information with your own to build the perfect millennial persona.
Customize this template and make it your own!Edit and Download
6. College Student Customer Persona Template
To boost enrollments and make your college widely known, you must create and use student personas. It will help you understand the needs of the prospective students at different points and reach out to them to provide better assistance. Use this template to build a college student buyer persona and guide your students throughout their customer journey map.
Customize this template and make it your own!Edit and Download
7. Avid Shopper Customer Persona Template
Every customer is essential to your business. However, high-paying customers that make a more significant impact on your business are objectively more valuable. Though they already buy from your store, strengthen their relationships with your business.
Use this buyer personas template to identify your high-spending shoppers and create personalized customer experiences to convert them into repeat customers.
Customize this template and make it your own!Edit and Download
8. Software Developer Customer Persona Template
Are you targeting software developers to sell your product or service? Maybe it’s code-testing software or a tool for user-friendly game design? Whatever you plan to do, you need to learn about the pain points of a web developer first. This template buyer persona will help you do that.
The dark shade of blue in the background makes the purplish-red design elements pop, giving the overall design a sophisticated look.
Customize this template and make it your own!Edit and Download
9. UX Designer Customer Persona Template
As we have already discussed, building a buyer persona requires visualizing your ideal customer’s goals, frustrations and personality traits. This template is a perfect example of a buyer persona that includes the person’s motivations, goals, character type, frustrations and other traits.
Customize this template and make it your own!Edit and Download
Since the persona is a semi-fictional character, you will need an image to represent the persona better. Browse through Visme’s stock photo library and add an ideal image to your buyer persona template.
10. Reference Management Software Customer Persona Template
Make your buyer persona more effective by including data visualizations in this template. It uses a flowchart to visualize the customer journey, helping you create engaging content and provide value to your customers.
Customize this template and make it your own!Edit and Download
11. Real Estate App Customer Persona Template
Defining buyer persona for a real estate app is a gradual process. It takes a lot of market research, data analysis, competitive analysis and other efforts. And this buyer persona example will help you craft a realistic client portrait.
Customize this template and make it your own!Edit and Download
12. Ecommerce Customer Persona Template
Since the ideal buyer persona is a graphic designer, this template gives special attention to aesthetics. The stylish design elements on the gradient background give this template a unique look. However, you can try a few other gradients or solid colors in the background.
Customize this template and make it your own!Edit and Download
13. Online Learning Platform Customer Persona Template
Giving your personas a story is one of the best ways to visualize the type of customers interacting with your brand. Also, the marketing team needs adequate information to understand the user persona and create content accordingly. If you are looking for something like that, this template can be handy.
Customize this template and make it your own!Edit and Download
14. Ride-Sharing App Customer Persona Template
This buyer persona template is for a ride-sharing app that appeals to young professionals. Therefore, the business may need to deal with people from various professional backgrounds.
Your business may need a double persona approach like this one to meet the needs of all your ideal customers. Use this beautiful template to build the perfect customer persona for your company.
Customize this template and make it your own!Edit and Download
15. Code Review System Customer Persona Template
This comprehensive and aesthetically pleasing customer persona template is for a code review system. The system helps beginner programmers who often make mistakes when writing code. So, the business has identified that beginner programmers with more than 80% of technical debt are their ideal customers.
Edit this template to create a comprehensive buyer persona like this.
All the buyer persona examples displayed above are fully customizable. So, customize them as you want and download them in PDF, JPEG or HTML5 format or share them using a private link.
Customize this template and make it your own!Edit and Download
Buyer Persona FAQs
What’s the difference between a buyer persona and a user persona?
The major difference between a buyer persona and a user persona is that buyer personas are created to help better understand the persona’s motivations. In contrast, user personas are created to establish a sense of empathy between the business and end-users.
Visme also offers user persona templates you can easily customize and use, just like the buyer persona templates.
How do I create my own persona?
Choose a buyer persona template from Visme’s template library, customize it with the document creator and download it to make it your own. Take advantage of our Brand Wizard to automatically add your brand’s logo, fonts and colors to ready-to-use templates in minutes.
What are the key components of a buyer persona?
The key components of a buyer persona are:
- Demographics
- Lifestyle
- Needs & Wants
- Challenges
- Identity
- Fear, Doubts and Frustrations
- Buying Behavior
- Information Sources
How long does it take to create a buyer persona?
According to a recent survey, small companies spend between 22.5 to 72.5 hours creating buyer personas. However, you can create it using Visme within minutes.
How to Use Buyer Personas
Here are some steps on how to use buyer personas effectively:
- Research and gather data: Conduct market research, analyze customer feedback and demographics and gather insights from sales and customer service teams.
- Define your buyer personas: Use the insights gathered from your research to create detailed profiles of your ideal customers.
- Segment your audience: Use the data collected to segment your audience into groups with similar characteristics and create a separate persona for each group.
- Use personas to inform marketing strategies: Once you have defined your buyer personas, use them to inform your marketing strategies. Create targeted messaging, advertising and content that speaks to the specific needs and interests of each persona.
- Evaluate and refine: Regularly evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and refine your personas based on new data and insights. This will help you to continuously improve your marketing efforts and ensure they remain relevant to your target audience.
Overall, using buyer personas can help businesses better understand their customers, tailor their marketing efforts and improve customer engagement and conversion rates.
What Are the Characteristics of a Buyer Persona?
The characteristics of a buyer persona will vary depending on your business and target audience. Generally, a buyer persona should include the following:
- Demographic information: This includes basic information about your ideal customer’s age, gender, income level, education and occupation.
- Job title and responsibilities: Identify your ideal customer’s job title, as well as their responsibilities and challenges related to their work.
- Goals and challenges: Understand your ideal customer’s goals and challenges, both personal and professional, that relate to your product or service.
- Values and beliefs: Consider your ideal customer’s values and beliefs, as well as their attitudes towards your industry or product.
- Decision-making criteria: Understand the factors that influence your ideal customer’s decision-making process, such as price, quality and convenience.
- Communication preferences: Identify how your ideal customer prefers to communicate, such as email, phone, or in-person meetings.
- Buying behavior: Understand the purchasing habits and behaviors of your ideal customer, such as the buying cycle, preferred purchasing channels and factors that influence their decision to make a purchase.
All in all, a buyer persona should provide a detailed understanding of your ideal customer’s needs, interests and behaviors. This information can then be used to create targeted marketing campaigns and improve customer engagement and conversion rates.
What Is a Buyer Persona in Simple Words?
Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers based on real data and insights about your target audience. It’s a way to create a detailed profile of your typical customer, including their demographics, interests, and buying habits.
Start Building Your Buyer Persona Now
Building a customer persona doesn’t just help you better understand the needs of your customers. It also helps you build your brand based on the audience you’re trying to reach.
Hopefully, this article helped you understand what a buyer persona is and how to create one for your business. Now it’s your turn.
Are you struggling to truly understand your ideal customer? Do you want to create a targeted marketing strategy that resonates with your audience and drives more sales? If the answer is yes, then it’s time to invest in a buyer persona template.
Source:- https://visme.co/blog/buyer-persona-template/