Creating Buyer Personas
Create Buyer Personas for your Business using FathomA buyer persona is a group of your customers with similar outlook and attitudes towards your product or service, represented as a fictional character.
Creating buyer personas can be an expensive and time-consuming exercise. However you can use Fathom to build buyer personas for your business yourself, at a fraction of the cost and time it usually takes.
1. About Buyer Personas
A buyer persona represents the archetypal customer of a group of your customers that behave in similar ways when discovering, purchasing and using your product or service. Typically you may decide to group your buyers into 3-4 such groups and represent each of them with a median fictional character, called the persona. The term buyer persona is often used interchangeably with marketing persona, buyer persona, customer persona or persona.
1.1 Benefits of Buyer Personas
Buyer personas help you always be in sight of the customer for whom you are building a product, designing a web app or writing marketing copy.
For example, when you build buyer personas for your online shop, you can take more informed decisions about:
- Organising your product catalog around your most profitable user groups
- Identifying the right channels to reach out to them in the most cost-effective way
- Using the right marketing copy and imagery that speaks to them in the most intimate manner
- All employees can have a shared, consistent, image of the archetypal customer, when pursuing user-centred design in product, marketing or engineering.
1.2 Who uses Buyer Personas
Many prominent companies including Google, Apple, Amazon, Deloitte, Procter & Gamble make use of Buyer Personas.
Buyer Personas are widely used in companies across verticals such as Software, Consumer Goods, Finance and Insurance, Internet Products and Services, Online Retailers, Travel and Tourism and Automotive and Vehicles among others.
2. Creating Buyer Personas for your Business
We outline a practical approach to building buyer personas using Fathom that will be significantly less expensive and less time consuming.
The methodology consists of 6 steps:
- Defining Goals and Sample Personas
- Recruiting and Segmenting Customers
- Conducting Customer Interviews
- Analysing the Interviews
- Creating the Personas
- Feedback Loop and Continuous Improvement
3. A Simple Case Study
Before jumping into a complex exercise, it might help to go through a case-study and see if it is for you.
In a brilliant talk in Google I/O 18, Walter Brill describes the process of choosing the right persona for the voice assistants of two fictional airlines, with distinctive target customer groups. We will take up this case-study for analysis.
4. Sample Buyer Personas
We have listed a few sample buyer personas so that you get an idea of what you will end up with, should you decided to conduct this exercise. Study the ones that you think come close to representing your own customers to see if this is something that will help you take better marketing, product or engineering decisions.
