Do you really know your customers? And if so, do you really know what makes them tick? In this lesson we’re going to talk about buyer personas and with the buyer persona, we could go ahead and tailor an exact experience for that exact customer so we’ll have a much higher chance of converting them and making more sales. Also, don’t forget to download the free buyer persona template we’ve prepared for you to tackle it with me or save it for later on. Think of a buyer persona is building a fictional avatar of your ideal customer.

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It helps you understand your customer’s goals as well as pain points so you can effectively market to them on multiple different channels. One of those channels being Facebook advertising, when you’re starting a Facebook campaign, you got to start off with building your audience. But if you have no idea where to start, using a buyer persona as an opportunity to find that perfect customer is great because you can start off with their demographics, their interests and behaviors, just to name a few.. Once you crack down on a solid buyer persona, you’ll be able to answer questions like, what type of content is more likely to generate a great response from an ideal customer?

Or how is that ideal customer’s experience going from the homepage all the way to the checkout and what kind of pain points are associated with that whole transactional journey? Now it’s super important to actually base your buyer personas off accurate data, rather than coming up with assumptions of my ideal customer. But not to worry, if you don’t have a lot of data to start off, with stick around till later portion of this blog, where I’ll be showing you some really cool tools so you can get some early stage information for your buyer persona. Now let’s actually talk about how the builder buyer persona. In this case, there are actually two ways of going about this, but before we do make sure to download our free buyer persona template, if you haven’t already.

Now let’s build our buyer persona together. In this scenario, I run Sally’s dog foods and my buyer persona is Chloe the veterinarian. First, we start off with building our buyer personas, we start off with, in my opinion, one of the easier categories of information, which is demographic. This information can usually be gathered from tools like Google analytics, which we’ll discuss in more detail shortly. But let’s get started. In this case of Chloe she’s 30 years old. She speaks English. Is located in Texas. She has a degree. Makes about $70,000 per year and is currently not in a relationship. Second, we start talking about professional traits about Chloe.

In this case, Chloe’s a veterinarian, which we’ve reviewed. She owns her own storefront and as the sole business owner, makes all of the buying decisions. But when it comes to our professional traits, Chloe has two problems. Problem number one, is the fact that Chloe’s customers are coming back to her and saying their pets aren’t enjoying the taste of her food that they’ve been recommended. Now, this gives us an opportunity to adjust our value proposition on maybe our product page, for example, where we can write copy saying “thousands of pets love the taste of this food,” or maybe use user generated content to have dog owners or cat owners or pet owners in general saying, “Hey, my pet loves the taste of this food,” or maybe even leveraging reviews on the product page as well, emphasizing the fact that they taste amazing, that would really help with problem number one.

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Now, Chloe, second problem is the fact that she’s recommending an average price point, which is fair, but our customers are coming back and saying there’s not enough nutrition in the food. Now for us, this gives us a great opportunity because at the end of the day for Sally’s pet food, we can go ahead and say, we have high nutrition at a mid tier price point, and that’s immediately going to catch Chloe’s attention since it solves her problem. Now, let’s talk about Chloe’s goals. Chloe wants to actually expand just like any other business. So for her, her goal is to expand into a new location on the other side of town, so she can meet a brand new audience.

Hey, that’s good for us, right? We get to sell more product. Now this template is just a starting point. So feel free to add any more categories of questions that you see fit. Now, depending on your business, you could have as few as one or two personas or as many as 10, but if you’re new to buyer personas definitely start small. The amazing part is, even though we went pretty in depth with Chloe, the veterinarian, there are still thousands of Chloe’s out there. And now that we understand some of her pain points, we can go ahead and start tailoring our value proposition and our messaging to address those pain points, to start making more sales.

A lot of you are probably thinking, where do we actually get this information to start populating my buyer persona? Or where do I start collecting this data? When it comes to collecting data to start populating your buyer personas, there are two common approaches. Number one is leveraging existing data, which is just a fancy term for your online store is collecting information, whether you know it or not, for example, like how often do people leave a product page immediately or in this case, how can actually go ahead and build a look alike audience on a Facebook campaign, similar to my competitors. Or maybe option number two, which is more of the traditional approach of just market research.

We’re going to be talking about interviewing specifically, but there are other approaches, for example, competitive analysis. So let’s get more to the specifics around leveraging existing data. The reason why leveraging your existing data is my favorite is because of how easy it is in comparison to traditional approaches. But keep in mind when it comes to leveraging this existing. It’s good to at least to have run your online business for a few months and maybe at least have a few hundred to a thousand users per month to start making sure your data is actually helpful.

But once you have good data, let’s start off with analytics. Luckily for you guys, Shopify actually has a Shopify analytics dashboard built into your Shopify. Which is fantastic, but I always recommend to have a second source of truth or a second way to collect your data analytics. And that’s where Google analytics comes in. Once you master your Shopify analytics and get a good understanding of Google analytics, you’ll be able to start populating the first category of our buyer persona, which is the Demographic. You can see if your customer is a first time or a returning visitor, you can see how often they actually spend time on your site, which device they’re using to actually navigate your site.

So much more demographic related information to give you a more accurate understanding of your buyer persona. Surveys are an excellent way to ask more in-depth questions to your customers to get into their mindset. Now, when it comes to surveys tools, I always like to use inquire post-purchase surveys. And try to get those surveys done at the end of the customer buying experience, to see what they like and what they didn’t like. Or perhaps you leveraging an email service tool like Klaviyo to maybe send out a survey if a customer abandoned some product at checkout and maybe ask the customer why they abandon the actual checkout and see what kind of pain points were associated with that whole user journey. Now, it’s also great to actually reward your customers once they do a survey, because at the end of the day, who really likes to do a survey and it’s a great way to maybe give them a discount code, make them come back to purchase another product and increase your lifetime value metric, which is extremely important for your customers and your brand.

Now your support is a last line of defense at times. And you’ll find that the majority of chat and help desk tools will allow you to actually store your conversation logs and collect customer satisfaction ratings. Now digging through these support conversations and identifying pain points and patterns with your customers is an incredible way of collecting crucial persona information and more importantly, identifying if there’s any barriers or challenge in your customer’s purchasing experience. Now let’s talk about market research, but specifically interviewing. Although my preferred approach, as you probably know, by now is leveraging existing data, the interviewing process holds a lot of value and here are a few approaches that I strongly recommend to get some interviews going.

First is internal conversations who knows more about your customers than your actual team. If you run a team it’s super important to get everyone on the same page on that ideal buyer persona. It’s a great way to start discussing customers’ pain points, goals, and common behaviors. So you can start building your customer personas and making sure your whole team is on the same page as you are. Our next way of finding interviewees is by leveraging social media. Now leverage a platform like Facebook for example, once you’ve identified an early buyer persona and start reaching out to friends or friends of friends. Or leverage a tool like LinkedIn, for example, that actually has very specific filter criteria, so you can actually search people by job title, you can search them by industry, you can even go all the way down to their specific location as a great starting point.

Last but not least is user testing. Now, if you’re really struggling, trying to find an actual user that you think might be an early buyer persona to get more information, try using usertesting.com. It allows you to run remote user tests, typically on like an app or a website, which is great. But more importantly, it allows you to follow up with questions, to get more in-depth information about your users buying behavior that will mesh well with your brand and your messaging and product and services. So once we’ve built our buyer personas, how can we immediately put them into action? First is paid advertising. To start simple. We’ll identify our customer’s favorite social media platforms versus the ones they just don’t like to use. And then when it comes to advertising, we can go ahead and actually build out that audience with our buyer persona, and we can start tailoring perhaps our whole marketing funnel all the way down to our specific product page description, to make sure that we empathize as best as we can with our customers to get the most return on our ad spent.

Next is sales. You or your sales team can now use the persona information to create that perfect prospect to prepare the reach out to. Now your salespeople can now actually know the factors that influence whether a prospect may be a purchaser or not by identifying what motivates them, their pain points of that persona and that sales team can actually craft the perfect unique selling proposition to make sure that they can take that cold lead and make them into an actual warm lead. Last is customer support. Supoport teams can now identify if there are any barriers to prepare for like a necessary skill to make a purchase or secondary language that needs to be incorporated.

For example, if we find more Spanish users are on our website, it might be great to incorporate Spanish onto our online store. More importantly, based on current challenges and pain points, your support teams can now start tailoring support docs, and FAQ’s based off of common feedback, and research. If you’re looking into some additional tools to nail down your buyer personas, I’d check out, HubSpots make my persona. Think of it as I said earlier, building an avatar in a really cool, interactive and engaging way, but you’re building your buyer persona.

It’s a lot of fun. Next is market Explorer by SEM rush. Now this tool will allow you to study the top businesses in your related industry and copy the same types of users that are interacting with your competitors. What’s the point of trying to find this information when it’s already there with SEM rush. And last but not least, if you love using Shopify apps, as much as my self, checkout shopsense, it’s an AI powered Shopify app that just starts taking your customer’s information and start segmenting them into multiple different buyer personas, so you can start getting an idea of what your customers are truly like. Buyer personas are the foundation of the future of our business, and now that we understand what it is, why it works, how we build one and how to apply it, we can feel a lot more comfortable we’re making the right decisions with the right data.

Ultimately, you’re going to have a new problem on your hands. How are you going to fulfill all of these new orders? Stay tuned because we have a blog on that topic very soon. If you’re serious about starting an online business, Shopify has everything you need and more. Take this from someone who’s built and started tons of e-commerce brands. I’ve seen my brand and countless other brands I’ve worked with scale beyond belief. Hey, my name is Ritoban and I’ve been running multiple e-commerce stores in the US as well as in India for the past several years on a platform called Shopify. The best part is the trial is completely free with no credit card required and gives you 14 days to level up your business and your brand.