KEY TAKEAWAYS: 

• A buyer persona is a semi-fictional depiction of your ideal customer
• Buyer personas include elements like role, goals, and watering holes
• Buyer personas are key in helping optimize sales and marketing communication at each stage of the buyer’s journey

Creating effective marketing materials that connect with your ideal audience hinges on a keen understanding of who you’re trying to reach and what you’re trying to convey. Buyer personas help establish the who, what, and why of your marketing materials, simplifying the process of communicating with different audience segments. 

Here, we’ll look at how buyer personas work, why they’re important, and some tips to help you create accurate buyer personas to deliver marketing messages that help you grow your business. 

What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional depiction of your ideal customer that is created using customer data, market research, and actual customer insights. Buyer personas give you a target to aim for in terms of creating sales and marketing content that will appeal and resonate with a specific audience — marketing materials that are crafted without using buyer personas are often too generic, or they don’t speak to the needs and challenges necessary to influence the right people. 

What is an example of a buyer persona for printers? 

For printers, a good example of a buyer person would be Marketing Marty — yes, giving your buyer personas hypothetical names helps you better organize your personas and makes the process of creating them a little more fun. 

In this instance, Marketing Marty could be a marketing manager for a financial services company. His or her primary challenge could be creating cost-effective, high-volume direct mailers in a timely manner to comply with regulatory guidelines. 

A well-developed buyer persona for Marketing Marty outlines his or her main pain points and how your print services can help them alleviate these pain points. A buyer persona for Marketing Marty should also include things like watering holes — the organizations and professional publications where this persona gets new information — and purchasing preferences to further help you tailor the messaging.

This level of detail helps you communicate in a more meaningful way with Marketing Marty by demonstrating you understand his or her challenges. Plus, this helps you take a more solutions-oriented approach to help Marketing Marty overcome obstacles and reach specific goals. 

How do you create a buyer persona?

Buyer personas go beyond general demographic data — they give your target audience an identity driven by motivations, preferences, and behaviors. The process of creating

buyer personas demands analysis and critical thinking about your target buyer, what they want, and how you can help them attain it. 

These are some key elements to consider when creating a buyer persona:

• Role. What role does your persona have in a company or organization? What does their typical day look like? What skills are required for their job? What are their job responsibilities? Who do they report to, and who reports to them? Answering these questions is important to understanding the needs and challenges your persona faces.
• Organization. What industry does your persona work in? What is the size of their company? No two companies are the same, making this element of persona creation essential.
• Goals. What goals, objectives, or progress benchmarks is your persona responsible for? Knowing this will help you communicate how you can help them achieve their goals and meet — or exceed — their benchmarks.   
• Watering holes. How does your persona learn about new trends related to their job? What publications do they read? What professional organizations do they belong to? This can help you distribute your communications in the most effective way possible relative to your audience.
• Purchasing preferences. How does your persona search for information when weighing a purchase? How do they prefer to interact or engage with vendors? Answering these questions can help you communicate with your persona in a way that’s most conducive to closing a deal. 

Why are buyer personas important?

Think of buyer personas as something of a guidebook on how to engage your target audience. A buyer persona outlines the kind of messaging that is most likely to engage your target audience, and it also helps identify the most appropriate distribution channel for that messaging. Buyer personas also help you effectively communicate with your ideal customer at each different stage of the buyer’s journey. 

For example, the way in which you engage your customer at the awareness stage is different from how you engage them at the consideration or decision stage. Buyer personas can act as guardrails of sorts to help ensure your communications at each stage remains consistent with a persona’s needs, challenges, and opportunities. This helps ensure your messaging remains true to your brand model and message map, regardless of who you’re trying to reach and where they are in the buyer’s journey. 

Buyer personas are imperative for creating personalized marketing communications that forge a connection with your target audience. But buyer personas are also valuable in helping you gain better insight into who your customer is — this makes it easier to put yourself in their shoes, which can help make you a more valuable print partner. 

For more free marketing resources, check out the thINK Marketing Toolkit.    

Madison Brudi is a Senior Account Manager at Trekk where she works with a variety of clients in the commercial print services industry to create vibrant, engaging sales and marketing communications to help grow their business.