Finding your ideal customer: a guide to creating a perfect buyer persona
Posted: Tue Dec 24, 2024 8:58 am
Know exactly who your best customer is even if you don't have any customers yet.
You may have used online dating apps before . I have too. It’s both an incredible achievement of the digital age and an awkward, humiliating ritual that modern singles are forced to endure in order to meet people.
But now that I'm a Growth Marketing consultant I've discovered that my online dating days have taught me a few things about digital marketing.
What does online dating have to do with content creation and marketing for startups ?
Believe it or not, everything.
The Online Dating Paradox
There's the thing about dating apps: in order for the process student database to work – in order for you to achieve your goal of finding the most compatible person for your relationship needs – you need to know exactly who you're looking for .
Otherwise, the algorithms will have little to base their search on other superficial factors that have little to do with true compatibility.
Dating sites and apps will come up with suggestions, sure, but the likelihood of those suggestions being perfect for your needs becomes slim.
Furthermore, once you’ve found ‘The One’, there’s no guarantee that you’re the right person for them. After all, they may meet all the parameters you’re looking for, but if your profile isn’t optimized to their needs, you could be overlooked in favor of the competition.
It's very similar to what happens in the world of startups, isn't it? As a member of a dating app, you're looking for someone to fulfill a need you have in your life ( in the case of a startup: money ), but in order for you to find them you need to know who you're looking for and what they're looking for.
The More Detailed You Are, The Better Your Results Will Be
Digital strategist Amy Webb shared her online dating experience in her TED Talk “ How I Cracked the Dating System . ”
Amy was having trouble finding a suitable mate using online dating services and felt the need to reverse engineer the algorithm so she could create a profile that would 'hook' her ideal man.
So she did what any self-respecting growth hacker would do: she A/B tested profiles and created a system to rank potential matches based on her own prerequisites for a potential partner.
After posting her newly optimized profile, Amy received a flood of responses and finally met the man she would later marry.
Where Does This Fit Into Marketing?
The more you know who your perfect client is, the more likely you are to find them and the more likely they are to find you.
From a copywriting and content creation perspective, the deeper your understanding of your customers' internal motivators, the easier it will be to persuade them to buy from you.
If it seems like a daunting task to identify 'The Right Person' for you and your company (especially if your company is a Startup that hasn't even started the customer acquisition process), fear not.
By the time you finish this article, you'll know the questions you need to ask and where to go to find that perfect 'Match'.
Read: B2B Prospecting in Practice: How to Find and Connect with Potential Customers Quickly and Scalably Using Cold Mail
It's Not About You (But It Feels Like It Is At First)
Ever heard the old saying “ you have to love yourself to love someone else ”? Trite, but true. In life and in business .
In order to find your ideal customer, you’ll need to take a personal inventory to discover your story as a brand and how it intertwines with your customer’s story.
Read also: Elements of Sales Marketing that Performs
Here are some questions to ask yourself as you prepare your research for your target customer:
What inspired me to start this business?
What burning need or desire does my core product or service fulfill?
What are the disadvantages of using my core product or service?
How is my core product or service better than any other option available, including doing nothing?
If you’re a startup, these are questions you’ve already answered for yourself when seeking funding. But it never hurts to revisit questions of origin and motivation as you seek to define and focus on your target.
'One' Is Not a Lonely Number
Now that you’ve done a personal search, it’s time to do a soulmate search for your ideal client.
Please note that I am using the singular form of “ client ”.
Trying to capture the attention and inspire a group of anonymous individuals, such as an “audience” or a “market” is like trying to take down an entire herd of antelope with one arrow: the key to creating compelling content is identifying the person whose story it fits into .
“What are you saying? Are you saying I should create content to fit my client’s story?”
Yes, in fact, as a content creator it is your job to tell a story ( captivating, informative and entertaining ) and provoke a desired emotion that convinces someone to take action.
But as a brand, your job isn’t to present information about yourself to a passive audience: your job is to play a role in your customers’ lives.
Your job is to share a story that you think will help your customer complete their own journey.
Which means that you and your brand are not the protagonists of the story.
Waiting for a Hero
Your customer is the protagonist or hero. Your brand exists to help the hero on their journey .
But here’s the cool, creative part where you get to do it: as the brand storyteller it’s up to you to define what the characteristics of your hero are.
That's right: you decide who you want to do business with .
Isn’t that liberating? Instead of desperately trying to be the perfect match for anyone and everyone – as many companies mistakenly try to do – you just need to continue being you ( as defined in the questions above ) and send a message to heroes whose journey you want to be a part of.
Building Your Hero's Character
In any RPG, before you start playing, you have to fill out a character sheet with your gender, race (or species), physical attributes, fighting skills, special powers, etc.
In the marketing world, we call this list of characteristics a Buyer Persona . As a business, it’s up to you to find the real customer who fits these characteristics and sell your product or service to them.
So how do you decide what the ideal characteristics are for the hero of your brand story? How do you fill out this ideal customer profile?
Through a combination of research, psychology and imagination .
The first elements of your customer profile are the external factors: the aspects about your customer’s life that are unlikely to change any time soon.
It's easy to get real insight into these factors by taking a look at who goes to your competitor for the same service or product you offer.
Who is your competitor's customer?
The first thing you need to do is identify the main competitors in your niche. This is super easy: just do a quick Google search for their main product or service.
I recommend that you use the top 5 results for your search. You can ignore the results that belong to sites that “ sell everything ”.
It should only take about 15 minutes to look at your competitor's websites and get an idea of who their target customer is.
Read also: [2021] Tips on How to Make Money Online with Infoproducts!
But we don't just want to have an idea. We want to investigate .
The point is: you need to find out EVERYTHING about who is actually visiting your competitors' website. This is where you can utilize Alexa .
For this ninja job you will need to sign up for a 7 day free trial.
Once you've signed up, log into Alexa and enter the URL of one of your top competitors.
If you scroll down past the traffic metrics, you’ll find a section with “ Audience demographics and geography “. This is what you need!
In this section you will find pretty much everything you need to know about the external factors of your competitors' target customer:
Sex
Age
Educational level
Income
Whether they surf the web from work or home
Whether they are married/single/have children
Your ethnicity
Pay attention to the points on the graphs that are significantly higher than the average: this indicates that the company is doing something to attract people with a specific characteristic.
Steal and Make Something New
So what to do with this competitive intelligence? Learn and differentiate yourself .
Pay attention to what is similar about all of your competitors' customers;
Decide what the common need is;
Fill in the gaps that aren’t represented: that’s your target customer .
Now you can do one of two things:
You can try to create another brand story that attracts the same customers as your competitors or
You can dare to tell a different story with a new protagonist.
Guess which one I suggest.
Yes! Go the other way and see what you can get.
Building Your Brand's Buyer Persona
It's time to build your ideal customer persona!
Let's imagine that you own a brand of travel backpacks and that your competitors' ideal customers are women, professionals, 30 years old, without children, white.
If you fill in the gaps that your competitors have, we know the following about your target customer:
Gender: Male (because everyone is targeting women)
Age: Mid-30s (because we want your customer to be old enough to afford a fancy travel backpack, but active enough to need it)
Profession: IT Consultant (Frequent Business Traveler)
Family status: Married with children
Ethnicity: South Asian (let's build a non-white hero, going against his competitors)
(Note that I didn't mention geography, but that can also play an important role in defining a target customer.)
Nationality: Brazilian
We're done!
Now meet Nigel Pathman :
As an IT consultant for companies across Asia, Nigel Pathman flies from his home to various locations in the Far East almost every month. He has been married for seven years and he and his wife have two daughters aged 3 and 5. Since Nigel’s elderly parents live in São Paulo and Nigel is an only child, he feels compelled to stay in Brazil rather than move his family to Asia.
Just from the external factors, we can understand why our client would want a versatile travel backpack, right? He’s always on the go, not just on a quick flight to take a vacation. Nigel uses long-haul flights – the kind of flights that have two or three connections.
He needs a bag for these trips—one he can easily carry through terminals and take straight from the airport to a client's office without looking like he's checking into a hotel.
A Matter of Taste
While External Factors alone can lead to good customers, it is not good enough.
Nigel has a lot of options out there – why did he choose his travel backpack?
Also read: Don't just have an MVP product, be the MVP
Because your backpack design and brand voice adapt to your taste.
Nigel is a cool guy. He likes things simple and functional. He’s a fan of science fiction, so if something has a futuristic feel, even better. But he’s not all style and no substance: Nigel is an amateur photographer and uses his camera to capture moments of beauty on his travels.
These are the details that will dictate the style and tone of your content. As Nigel is a fan of minimalism and photography, it’s important that any content you produce for both your website and social media reflects this with simple, uncluttered graphics and stunning travel photography.
“Okay, now I understand what Nigel likes. Can I stop here?”
No .
Because we’re not just selling a backpack to a frequent business traveler, we also want Nigel to be part of a community of brand advocates.
We want him to follow you on Instagram and share your content with his Facebook friends.
We want them to write a review on their favorite travel forum. We need them to feel connected to your brand, which means satisfying an emotional need.
What is his motivation?
Let's take a look at his Internal Factors .
Nigel is a classic extrovert. He loves meeting new people on his travels and strives to make a good impression wherever he goes. The last thing he wants to do is upset or disappoint anyone, so it’s important that he arrives on time for meetings.
That's why transferring his items from one bag to another while he's on the road can be disastrous: He needs to check into his hotel room, drop off his carry-on, grab his briefcase, and make sure his important documents are in order, then get to a meeting at a client's office.
In some Asian cities, getting from one part of town to another can take hours, depending on traffic. It would save you a lot of time, as well as panic and frustration, if you could just get off the plane and go straight to your client without having to deal with the hassle of moving your bags.
Here's the core of Nigel's story: he strives to win the admiration of his friends, and his greatest fear is disappointing them by arriving late or failing to keep a promise.
So how can you help him avoid this scenario?
You must create a role for yourself within the context of your story.
This way you can present your flagship product: a modular travel backpack designed to be transformed and match any scenario: work, play or travel.
Its design is elegant enough for business travel, yet sporty enough for Nigel to head out on a day of sightseeing in a tropical location.
Better yet, it easily converts into a briefcase so Nigel can look professional for his clients straight off the plane and then fashionably cool when he heads out to the bar after his meeting.
No stopping at the hotel first, no changing bags at the airport, just stress-free travel.
Just like your target customer, your brand is a character with external factors, taste and internal factors.
In this story, your brand acts as an expert travel companion and slightly quirky friend who is obsessed with keeping things efficient and organized. Your brand is there to make Nigel’s many trips more enjoyable and less stressful.
Knowing the role your brand plays in your target customer’s life will help you create countless other forms of content that will move them through the sales funnel.
You may have used online dating apps before . I have too. It’s both an incredible achievement of the digital age and an awkward, humiliating ritual that modern singles are forced to endure in order to meet people.
But now that I'm a Growth Marketing consultant I've discovered that my online dating days have taught me a few things about digital marketing.
What does online dating have to do with content creation and marketing for startups ?
Believe it or not, everything.
The Online Dating Paradox
There's the thing about dating apps: in order for the process student database to work – in order for you to achieve your goal of finding the most compatible person for your relationship needs – you need to know exactly who you're looking for .
Otherwise, the algorithms will have little to base their search on other superficial factors that have little to do with true compatibility.
Dating sites and apps will come up with suggestions, sure, but the likelihood of those suggestions being perfect for your needs becomes slim.
Furthermore, once you’ve found ‘The One’, there’s no guarantee that you’re the right person for them. After all, they may meet all the parameters you’re looking for, but if your profile isn’t optimized to their needs, you could be overlooked in favor of the competition.
It's very similar to what happens in the world of startups, isn't it? As a member of a dating app, you're looking for someone to fulfill a need you have in your life ( in the case of a startup: money ), but in order for you to find them you need to know who you're looking for and what they're looking for.
The More Detailed You Are, The Better Your Results Will Be
Digital strategist Amy Webb shared her online dating experience in her TED Talk “ How I Cracked the Dating System . ”
Amy was having trouble finding a suitable mate using online dating services and felt the need to reverse engineer the algorithm so she could create a profile that would 'hook' her ideal man.
So she did what any self-respecting growth hacker would do: she A/B tested profiles and created a system to rank potential matches based on her own prerequisites for a potential partner.
After posting her newly optimized profile, Amy received a flood of responses and finally met the man she would later marry.
Where Does This Fit Into Marketing?
The more you know who your perfect client is, the more likely you are to find them and the more likely they are to find you.
From a copywriting and content creation perspective, the deeper your understanding of your customers' internal motivators, the easier it will be to persuade them to buy from you.
If it seems like a daunting task to identify 'The Right Person' for you and your company (especially if your company is a Startup that hasn't even started the customer acquisition process), fear not.
By the time you finish this article, you'll know the questions you need to ask and where to go to find that perfect 'Match'.
Read: B2B Prospecting in Practice: How to Find and Connect with Potential Customers Quickly and Scalably Using Cold Mail
It's Not About You (But It Feels Like It Is At First)
Ever heard the old saying “ you have to love yourself to love someone else ”? Trite, but true. In life and in business .
In order to find your ideal customer, you’ll need to take a personal inventory to discover your story as a brand and how it intertwines with your customer’s story.
Read also: Elements of Sales Marketing that Performs
Here are some questions to ask yourself as you prepare your research for your target customer:
What inspired me to start this business?
What burning need or desire does my core product or service fulfill?
What are the disadvantages of using my core product or service?
How is my core product or service better than any other option available, including doing nothing?
If you’re a startup, these are questions you’ve already answered for yourself when seeking funding. But it never hurts to revisit questions of origin and motivation as you seek to define and focus on your target.
'One' Is Not a Lonely Number
Now that you’ve done a personal search, it’s time to do a soulmate search for your ideal client.
Please note that I am using the singular form of “ client ”.
Trying to capture the attention and inspire a group of anonymous individuals, such as an “audience” or a “market” is like trying to take down an entire herd of antelope with one arrow: the key to creating compelling content is identifying the person whose story it fits into .
“What are you saying? Are you saying I should create content to fit my client’s story?”
Yes, in fact, as a content creator it is your job to tell a story ( captivating, informative and entertaining ) and provoke a desired emotion that convinces someone to take action.
But as a brand, your job isn’t to present information about yourself to a passive audience: your job is to play a role in your customers’ lives.
Your job is to share a story that you think will help your customer complete their own journey.
Which means that you and your brand are not the protagonists of the story.
Waiting for a Hero
Your customer is the protagonist or hero. Your brand exists to help the hero on their journey .
But here’s the cool, creative part where you get to do it: as the brand storyteller it’s up to you to define what the characteristics of your hero are.
That's right: you decide who you want to do business with .
Isn’t that liberating? Instead of desperately trying to be the perfect match for anyone and everyone – as many companies mistakenly try to do – you just need to continue being you ( as defined in the questions above ) and send a message to heroes whose journey you want to be a part of.
Building Your Hero's Character
In any RPG, before you start playing, you have to fill out a character sheet with your gender, race (or species), physical attributes, fighting skills, special powers, etc.
In the marketing world, we call this list of characteristics a Buyer Persona . As a business, it’s up to you to find the real customer who fits these characteristics and sell your product or service to them.
So how do you decide what the ideal characteristics are for the hero of your brand story? How do you fill out this ideal customer profile?
Through a combination of research, psychology and imagination .
The first elements of your customer profile are the external factors: the aspects about your customer’s life that are unlikely to change any time soon.
It's easy to get real insight into these factors by taking a look at who goes to your competitor for the same service or product you offer.
Who is your competitor's customer?
The first thing you need to do is identify the main competitors in your niche. This is super easy: just do a quick Google search for their main product or service.
I recommend that you use the top 5 results for your search. You can ignore the results that belong to sites that “ sell everything ”.
It should only take about 15 minutes to look at your competitor's websites and get an idea of who their target customer is.
Read also: [2021] Tips on How to Make Money Online with Infoproducts!
But we don't just want to have an idea. We want to investigate .
The point is: you need to find out EVERYTHING about who is actually visiting your competitors' website. This is where you can utilize Alexa .
For this ninja job you will need to sign up for a 7 day free trial.
Once you've signed up, log into Alexa and enter the URL of one of your top competitors.
If you scroll down past the traffic metrics, you’ll find a section with “ Audience demographics and geography “. This is what you need!
In this section you will find pretty much everything you need to know about the external factors of your competitors' target customer:
Sex
Age
Educational level
Income
Whether they surf the web from work or home
Whether they are married/single/have children
Your ethnicity
Pay attention to the points on the graphs that are significantly higher than the average: this indicates that the company is doing something to attract people with a specific characteristic.
Steal and Make Something New
So what to do with this competitive intelligence? Learn and differentiate yourself .
Pay attention to what is similar about all of your competitors' customers;
Decide what the common need is;
Fill in the gaps that aren’t represented: that’s your target customer .
Now you can do one of two things:
You can try to create another brand story that attracts the same customers as your competitors or
You can dare to tell a different story with a new protagonist.
Guess which one I suggest.
Yes! Go the other way and see what you can get.
Building Your Brand's Buyer Persona
It's time to build your ideal customer persona!
Let's imagine that you own a brand of travel backpacks and that your competitors' ideal customers are women, professionals, 30 years old, without children, white.
If you fill in the gaps that your competitors have, we know the following about your target customer:
Gender: Male (because everyone is targeting women)
Age: Mid-30s (because we want your customer to be old enough to afford a fancy travel backpack, but active enough to need it)
Profession: IT Consultant (Frequent Business Traveler)
Family status: Married with children
Ethnicity: South Asian (let's build a non-white hero, going against his competitors)
(Note that I didn't mention geography, but that can also play an important role in defining a target customer.)
Nationality: Brazilian
We're done!
Now meet Nigel Pathman :
As an IT consultant for companies across Asia, Nigel Pathman flies from his home to various locations in the Far East almost every month. He has been married for seven years and he and his wife have two daughters aged 3 and 5. Since Nigel’s elderly parents live in São Paulo and Nigel is an only child, he feels compelled to stay in Brazil rather than move his family to Asia.
Just from the external factors, we can understand why our client would want a versatile travel backpack, right? He’s always on the go, not just on a quick flight to take a vacation. Nigel uses long-haul flights – the kind of flights that have two or three connections.
He needs a bag for these trips—one he can easily carry through terminals and take straight from the airport to a client's office without looking like he's checking into a hotel.
A Matter of Taste
While External Factors alone can lead to good customers, it is not good enough.
Nigel has a lot of options out there – why did he choose his travel backpack?
Also read: Don't just have an MVP product, be the MVP
Because your backpack design and brand voice adapt to your taste.
Nigel is a cool guy. He likes things simple and functional. He’s a fan of science fiction, so if something has a futuristic feel, even better. But he’s not all style and no substance: Nigel is an amateur photographer and uses his camera to capture moments of beauty on his travels.
These are the details that will dictate the style and tone of your content. As Nigel is a fan of minimalism and photography, it’s important that any content you produce for both your website and social media reflects this with simple, uncluttered graphics and stunning travel photography.
“Okay, now I understand what Nigel likes. Can I stop here?”
No .
Because we’re not just selling a backpack to a frequent business traveler, we also want Nigel to be part of a community of brand advocates.
We want him to follow you on Instagram and share your content with his Facebook friends.
We want them to write a review on their favorite travel forum. We need them to feel connected to your brand, which means satisfying an emotional need.
What is his motivation?
Let's take a look at his Internal Factors .
Nigel is a classic extrovert. He loves meeting new people on his travels and strives to make a good impression wherever he goes. The last thing he wants to do is upset or disappoint anyone, so it’s important that he arrives on time for meetings.
That's why transferring his items from one bag to another while he's on the road can be disastrous: He needs to check into his hotel room, drop off his carry-on, grab his briefcase, and make sure his important documents are in order, then get to a meeting at a client's office.
In some Asian cities, getting from one part of town to another can take hours, depending on traffic. It would save you a lot of time, as well as panic and frustration, if you could just get off the plane and go straight to your client without having to deal with the hassle of moving your bags.
Here's the core of Nigel's story: he strives to win the admiration of his friends, and his greatest fear is disappointing them by arriving late or failing to keep a promise.
So how can you help him avoid this scenario?
You must create a role for yourself within the context of your story.
This way you can present your flagship product: a modular travel backpack designed to be transformed and match any scenario: work, play or travel.
Its design is elegant enough for business travel, yet sporty enough for Nigel to head out on a day of sightseeing in a tropical location.
Better yet, it easily converts into a briefcase so Nigel can look professional for his clients straight off the plane and then fashionably cool when he heads out to the bar after his meeting.
No stopping at the hotel first, no changing bags at the airport, just stress-free travel.
Just like your target customer, your brand is a character with external factors, taste and internal factors.
In this story, your brand acts as an expert travel companion and slightly quirky friend who is obsessed with keeping things efficient and organized. Your brand is there to make Nigel’s many trips more enjoyable and less stressful.
Knowing the role your brand plays in your target customer’s life will help you create countless other forms of content that will move them through the sales funnel.