Every business needs to know who they are targeting, and the best way to do that on a large scale is by creating buyer personas. Below are some tips and best practices we use at Colibri to help you understand buyer persona how to process.

You know who your best client is. You’ve seen their faces every month at your store or in meetings, you already memorized their name on your purchases report, interacted with them constantly on social media, and maybe even sent them special deals or messages when their favorite products arrive. 

It makes sense to want to clone your favorite client. At Colibri,  we understand you, and we want to help you in the process of “cloning” them and their interest in your business. 

Your favorite client is your favorite client because your brand was created to solve one of their most significant issues, whether you know it or not. Your solution addresses their challenge and answers the questions they have. Because of that, they feel like you understand them and support their lives. 

How can you clone this client?

Identify who they are and find what makes them so interested in your business so you can find more people like them. To do this, you’re going to need to understand what makes them tick. Without being creepy, watch them, see what products they like, what they buy, at what time, how often, what they do when they’re in your store, do they follow you online, or do they prefer to call?

But besides monitoring how they interact with your brand, what can you do?

Interviewing Your Ideal Client

Once you know who you want to clone, and hopefully, you have a couple of favorite clients; you need to go the extra mile. Ask them for an interview! Tell them how valuable they are to your business, how you appreciate their interest, and how you would like to learn more about them and what they want about your brand.

On top of telling them you value their business, you need to show them. It’s always a good idea to offer something in exchange as well. Tell them you’d like to provide them with a gift, or a big discount, or an invite to an exclusive brand event. Making the interview short is also essential to feel like it’s not a significant time investment. A simple 10 minutes interview can go a long way.

What Can I Ask Them?

You should have a questionnaire with the most critical questions handy for the interview. Here’s a list of things you should learn from the interview:

  • Demographic information.
  • Interests and hobbies.
  • Favorite brands. Not just related to your business but also any lifestyle brand that they like (news outlets, magazines, restaurants, clothes, etc.).
  • Daily and digital routine. The hours they check email, social media, grab a coffee, eat, watch tv, work. 
  • Challenges they have and what solutions they might be looking for. 
  • Objections they might have around your business and similar activities.
  • Favorite digital platforms.
  • How they generally interact with your brand and other similar businesses. You want to understand touchpoints that could be used to entice people like them to purchase.
  • What initially drew them to your business.
  • Any other information that you feel might be useful to your business.

Compiling the Information

Once you have this information ready, sort them into categories. You might see some of your interviewees are around the same age and have similar interests or routines that could be used to create one persona. Ideally, you would get three buyer personas from these interviews.

Drafting your Buyer Personas

When your information is compiled, it’s time to start ideating your personas. Start by naming them and building their card (age, gender, interests, technology they use, routine [with digital touchpoints], challenges, solutions, and objections).

Capturing Online Audience Data

There are other ways of gathering data related to your audience. It’s not as efficient as interviewing your ideal customers for 10 minutes and asking them all of your questions, but there are other ways to learn more about  your audience:

Social Media

It might seem obvious to go to your favorite social media platform’s insights and see what data you can grab from there, such as information about demographics and shopping habits. Another way to capture relevant information is to ask for it. 

Use your posts and stories to do polls and Q&As, and discover what your audience prefers. Ask them about their interests, preferred digital platforms, favorite brands, influencers they interact with, and any questions that might be useful to understand your audience. 

You can also “stalk” your target audience on social media and check their favorite restaurants, brands, and hobbies on Instagram and Facebook. One way to do this is to look for people who hold the job position your persona might have on LinkedIn. This is incredibly helpful, especially if your business is a B2B. 

Audience Research

We know that doing interviews requires time, and it’s a long process, so here are some tips we use at Colibri to create starter buyer personas to guide your marketing efforts.

Google Analytics

An excellent tool to capture information for your buyer personas is Google Analytics. From there, you can grab some useful demographic information that might help you understand who the people visiting the website are.

You can also get information about their interests. Although those are more about the general affinity of your audience and in-market segments.

Facebook Audience Insights

Facebook Audience Analytics was recently discontinued. It provided you with robust information about who your audience is and their interests. Now, Facebook has Audience Insights, a tool that, although right now it’s not as powerful, offers you some significant data. 

You can quickly know the age, gender, top cities, and countries of your Instagram and Facebook account followers.

The tool also offers a Potential Audience feature that will allow you to identify top pages in different industries like media, artists, entertainment, and websites:

This information can also be filtered by location, age, interests, and language. So you can be specific about the people you want to learn more about.

These tips will help you understand your audience more and, hopefully, “clone” your ideal and favorite client.

Are you ready to start your buyer persona how to process? We’re here to help. Let us know if you have any questions, and we’ll gladly support you in this important process for your business.