Add as Much Detail as Possible to Your Buyer Persona
When creating your buyer persona, leave no stone unturned. In addition to basic demographic information, you should know as much as possible about your target customers.
Identify your target audience’s personality and how they like to spend their free time. Knowing how they’d prefer to spend their money is also a good idea. Depending on your audience, you might want to determine their relationship status and whether they have children.
Besides purchasing preferences, you also need to understand buying power. The base income level doesn’t matter as it’s relative to where they live. For example, someone earning $80,000 per year in Germany has more purchasing power than someone earning the same salary in Norway due to the cost of living.
Using advertising platforms can help you get better ideas as you can segment in more detail. Try advertising with Google if you have the budget, for example, or doing the same on Facebook.
Identify the Buyer’s Most Important Pain Points
Knowing about your customers is nice, but an effective buyer persona aims to solve problems. Therefore, you need to understand your target audience’s key pain points. Health, wealth, and happiness are three key areas to look at to begin with. Let’s use the example of a middle-aged person who wants to get into shape. Their pain point might look something like this:
“Steven is a hard-working father who has stopped exercising and eating healthy over the past 10 years due to stresses in his life. He has also distanced himself from toxic friends. He wants to start CrossFit classes to improve social connections and move better while doing something he enjoys. On a fundamental level, he wants energy to play with his children and his wife to be attracted to him.”
The above example addresses several human needs. The person lacks energy for the most important things in his life, and he wants a vibrant social life with like-minded people. He also wants his wife to be proud of him. Once we have this information, we can conceptualize what kinds of products could help this person.
You can often find a customer’s pain points by identifying what they desire and whether they’re having those needs filled. I also recommend asking ChatGPT to see if it has any ideas for filling out your persona. This is one of the best ways to use AI in marketing.
Define How Your Product or Service Helps Your Target Audience
You’ve hit the jackpot once you’ve identified your buyer persona’s pain points because you can then refine your product accordingly. Assess your current offerings and critically determine whether you’re truly meeting your audience’s needs.
If you already have products live, consider writing your product description again and refining the copy. Emphasize why your products and services will solve their problems.
Identify potential improvements you can make to your products and services as well. Many SaaS platforms let users make feature requests, for example, and you might want to consider doing the same.
Don’t Forget Personification
Personification might seem pointless, but it’s one of the most crucial aspects of a successful buyer persona.
Give each of your personas a name. When I first started freelance writing, I called my persona “Sander in SaaS” since I mainly focused on SaaS companies.
I also recommend creating a picture of your buyer persona. Leveraging AI is one of the smartest ways to do this; use tools like Adobe Firefly to create an image of the person who looks like your target customer (I used it within Express in the example below). You can also use DALL-E if you have a premium ChatGPT subscription.
