Test template 4

If you're not familiar with the term, a buyer persona is a fictional character that represents a very real market segment. Developed using real answers from real users (validated by proper research), buyer personas represent your ideal customer base. A good persona contains valuable insights into your buyers that will help guide product development, improve marketing strategies, and inform better content.

But what makes a great buyer persona? Well, in this article we’ll be looking at a few examples of B2C and B2B buyer personas and breaking them down.

If you're looking for a step by step guide on creating buyer personas, check out this article we wrote earlier. It’s super comprehensive and choc-full of information you might find useful further down!

How to create buyer personas

Buyer personas are an integral part of any product strategy - existing, new, or pending. If done right, they equip you with the tools you need to effectively market to specific audiences in a way that resonates with them, targets their touchpoints, and increases conversions.

Product Marketing AllianceEmma Bilardi

Read it already? Great! Let’s get started.

Business-to-customer buyer personas

When it comes to developing B2C personas, you don’t need to focus on work roles and responsibilities, instead you want to know more about their day-to-day lives and how this informs their buying decisions.

Brandi Tyler

Take this Brandi Tyler example from indie Game girl below:

This buyer persona is great for two reasons: 1. its conciseness, 2. its layout.

This buyer persona uses short blurbs to help you easily digest the information and presents it in a clean way, on one page. Using a photograph to represent your buyer is also a great way to remind yourself and your team who you are actually speaking to when developing campaigns.

When it comes to the content, the details really help you visualize the process Brandi goes through when she’s buying shoes. It clearly presents her pain points and includes actual quotes from customers. Adding details like this from your prior research gives factual credibility to your descriptions.

Millennial Molly

This example from Cyberclick was created by a food delivery kit. Millennial Molly is looking for a way to eat healthier, fresher food but just doesn't have the time to plan and prepare them herself. This example clearly outlines Molly’s pain points, allowing the company to easily position a solution. It outlines how Molly does her research when she’s shopping, which is really valuable information to have when the time comes to hatch a marketing plan.

It would be naive to think that all of your ideal customers will be searching for your product in the same place, but since we know that Molly does her research on YouTube, we could create video content about prepping healthy meals that we could re-purpose on Instagram and Facebook for extra reach.

Business-to-business buyer personas

Like the B2C examples above, the B2B buyer personas below focus on the individual, however, they include much more specific details about the persona’s work, responsibilities and how they interact with their company. It’s important to remember that the persona isn't always in charge of purchasing decisions, so those details need to be included in your description too.

Diane Director

As you can see, this example is a little more text heavy than the previous, but it’s crammed with really valuable nuggets of information and still only covers one page. At a quick glance you can see what a working day in the life of Diane is like, her pain points, values and goals, and the experience she’s looking for when seeking out products or services.

Using quotes from ‘Diane’ is a really nice touch too, and reminds us that there are real people behind these personas.