Let's talk about creating a buyer persona. Now, don't worry if you've never heard of that before—I'm going to walk through what it is. I'm going to give you an idea of why it's important.

This is something that if you don't have a clear idea on what this looks like, it's going to make creating content, writing website copy, and selecting the right images for your website really hard for you.

“Buyer persona” is a marketing term, used in the marketing and advertising spaces. Basically, it's a representation of who your ideal customer is. It's usually a fictitious representation, based on real data. It’s a complete, full, customized representation of who you’re marketing to, that guides and informs all your decisions moving forward.

One mistake that I see happen all the time is that people think, “Well my buyer is just me, right?”

That couldn't be further from the truth. They’re not you. It's totally possible and often encouraged that they have a lot of the same interests as you, but they're not you.

I'll give you an example of this to prove why I believe this wholeheartedly.

For the first six years of my business, I treated my buyer as a complete extension of me. I said everything that I would want to hear. I showed the images that were my favorite. I thought I would attract people that way.

And while I did get some customers, what I realized more and more as I was talking to people that I truly actually liked working with was that they were nothing like me. In fact, when it came down to their interests–the biggest thing that I could have used in order to really resonate with those people–had nothing to do with my life at all.

And the example I’ll give is my buyers, my ideal clients, were super into going to craft breweries. They were loving IPAs, they were going wine tasting, they loved going bar hopping.

For me, I don't drink. My brother passed away in part due to alcoholism, and it’s just a personal choice that I made. I was missing major opportunities because I was making assumptions that they were like me in that regard. But that wasn't fair of me to say, because it's not like they all had alcoholic brothers, right?

They’re going to have their own interests. It's okay if we have aligned interests and things that we have in common, but you're missing the bigger picture when you're treating all your buyer representations as an extension of you. They're not you. You all have different life experiences that sum up who you are.

The other thing I see often from creative business owners, especially if they are newer, is that, most of the time, they have a general idea of who they want to work with, but it's based on very limited aspects.

Let’s just say you’re a photographer, you might be able to say that you want to work with people that like Bohemian style, or with the type of person that's having an industrial wedding downtown.

That's just a generalized idea. A buyer persona allows you to really look deeper into the life of someone rather than just categorizing them and putting them in a box with just one interest. It allows you to have a clear idea of what their reality is like, and as an extension, you're going to be able to connect with them on multiple different levels that you never even thought were possible.

It allows you to really take all the ideas of the people that you want to work with that are in your head and prove that these people actually exist in real life, and it's going to allow you to no longer just have guesswork.

This also guarantees that you have people in your area that you want to work with. I have had instances with some of my 1:1 clients where people have gone through this process and realized the people that they wanted to work with didn’t live where they lived, and so they needed to market their services for a town that was an hour or two away.

But that allowed them to book more weddings because they were reaching the people that they wanted to reach rather than just putting all this pressure on the town that they lived in.

When you do this process, it allows you to know where they're at, where you can find them, and push your marketing efforts to that so you can be more. This will allow you to navigate your marketing in a way where everything you create seems created with them in mind, and it's very thoughtful.

What to Identify

Let's talk about the things we should be able to identify by the end of this exercise.

Interests

What do they like to do in their free time? What do they like spending their money on? What brands do they buy from? What's the overall sense of their personal style? What age range do you typically serve? What gender?

You could maybe be in the boat where you service all genders. Just knowing location, education level, income level—just having an idea of your typical buyer’s interest will serve you.

Motivations

Figuring out what they value, potential objections when it comes to making purchases, what their goals are, what challenges they are having when trying to reach their goals. All of these allow you to make informed marketing decisions when it comes to posting, generating a copy, and creating a website.

A lot of people come to me and ask, “I don't know what to post. I don't know what to put on my feed. I don't know what to make for short form video content.”

When you understand all of this, suddenly you no longer get fogginess when it comes to creating content. You know who your audience is.

WHERE TO GET THE DATA

You might be thinking, “Market research data, that sounds like it's going to take a lot of work.” 

It's so much easier than you think. All it really takes is just a little bit of knowing what to look for. And when you're able to do that, that's going to give you so much more clarity on who your buyer is.

The easiest way is looking through social media profiles. You can do this on any profile. This can be YouTube, this can be Facebook, this can be TikTok, any social media profile.

I want you to think like a marketer. What does that mean? When you see anything, you want to look at everything and make keen observations based on what you see.

Find some profiles of people you would like to work with. When you look through their profiles, what do you notice? What brands are they using? What does their space look like around them? How do they describe themselves in their bios?

You can glean a lot from a picture or video without them saying much. I basically extract information based on what I see. Now anyone who posts something on a social media profile will more or less tell you what they're interested in without directly saying it.

A woman doesn't have to say, “I'm a mom,” but we can conclude that because of how many pictures she has of her kids. And anything that they post will tell you what they're interested in.

If they're posting pictures of their food or their latte? They like coffee, they like food. What type of food is it? It's Mexican. Okay, they like Mexican food. You can start compiling a list like this.

This is data research. So many of us think that market research is more extensive than this, and this is literally ‘How to Observe People 101’ and all of this is incredibly valid.

I would write out 20 identifiers for seven people that you see on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube that you would just be over the moon to work with. This shouldn't be hard, right? Most of you can think right out of the gate of at least two or three people that would be amazing.

And as you're writing that down for seven different people, I want you to then take all of the pieces of paper, put them right next to each other. If you need to have them all out on a table, that's fine, but I want you to underline the common ones between all seven of those people. And those are identifiers that they all share together.

When you find an identifier about someone, you can ask yourself even more questions. For example if they liked In-N-Out Burger, what did they order? Was it a burger? Was it fries? Did they also get a milkshake? All of these things really, really, really help.

When you're doing exercises like this, you're not making this stuff up. The big difference between where the idea that's in our head of the people that we want to work with versus the real life data is just confirming that it actually exists. You are taking the information that other people will give you and putting it together. Use those collectively to create your fictional representation of who your buyer is.

When you do that, you create your buyer persona.

Now, if you want help with this, I show data-gathering examples and have a worksheet to aid you in building your buyer persona, both available (with loads of other helpful trainings) in my Business Conservatory Program. You will also get direct access to me and a community of other creative business owners like you. Learn more here and join for free today.

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