Buyer Personas 

Let’s talk for a minute about customer avatars or buyer personas, sometimes called ICPs or ideal customer profiles. A lot of copywriters create these as part of their research process. Clients usually love them, because they present an exact customer they can target and write to. And if you use them in your business, that’s great.

A buyer persona is a snapshot of your ideal client. Rather than thinking about a broad target audience, it’s a specific example of the typical person who is part of your target market. But one of the drawbacks with personas is you get so specific with who you are writing to, you risk writing to the wrong audience.

I quickly googled buyer persona examples and this is pretty typical of what comes up. If you want to pause the video and look at these in more detail, go for it. But notice, most of the information included in the typical buyer persona is demographic data. Things like age, sex, marital status, the number of kids, education levels, income levels, and that sort of thing. They may even be as specific as to what job title they hold or where they went to school. But there are very few psychological details here. As I look at these examples, I’m not seeing a lot here that I could use to write emotional copy that connects deeply with this customer.

This example isn’t a real buyer persona… but it shows the problem with trusting this kind of data to write your copy.

Here’s what I don’t like about the typical persona, avatar or customer profile. There are no real personal details. Nothing visceral about their struggles, hesitations, or problems. Nothing to empathize with. Very little about what keeps them up at night. Nothing about the triggers that make them buy now rather than wait or choose another solution. 

Part of the reason personas rarely include these details is that information like this is hard to dig up. It takes time and effort to do that. And most people creating personas just don’t go to that level of work.

When I worked at Hewlett-Packard, the division I worked most closely with was a photoprinter. They printed photo books and customized other items with photos. At the time it was cutting edge stuff. They spent months developing a buyer persona for their core customer. They called her Emily. And the persona included lots of details you might expect to see, like how many children Emily had, her age, where she lived. All that.

At one point the managing director hired a marketing consultant to help with new product development and marketing. In their research, they found that the persona everyone was writing for actually made up less than 20% of the customer base. More than 80% of the customers we were sending Emily-messaging to weren’t like Emily at all and couldn’t relate to her. In this case, the persona was almost useless for figuring out what to write about, what to sell or how to market to our ideal customers. It was making our copy worse. 

A lot of avatars or personas are like Emily—a nice idea, but ultimately not that useful for connecting with actual customers. And maybe even harmful in some cases.

Now, if you choose to create personas or avatars as part of your research process, that’s cool. Like we said, clients tend to love them. And delivering a customer profile as part of your research feels valuable. But go the extra step to get beyond the demographics and add the visceral, psychographic details we need when writing emotional copy. The documents we’ll show you in this course will help you get those insights.

If you’re selling hair care products to black women, it’s not the demographic details that matter. It’s the frustration they feel when the only option at the store is shampoo and conditioner optimized for white customers. That’s a trigger. That’s the kind of thing that makes a customer angry, frustrated, or feel overlooked so they look for a better solution. Notice it’s the frustration that matters here, far more than the demographic details.

The same is true for dozens of other products. Yes, pregnant women buy prenatal vitamins, but more important than the demographic detail of “pregnancy” is the fear that they are not doing enough to ensure their baby is as healthy as possible. That’s a trigger for action. “Am I a bad mom? ” is far more compelling than, “I am pregnant.” 

Think psychographics: needs, problems, fears, desires, and hesitations rather than age, income, and education levels.

As a researcher, you are looking for specific details and emotions. What is the trigger that makes them look for a solution? What is the motivation to take action now? What benefits and outcomes does your prospect want? What parts of her worldview can you tap into as you write? This is the stuff to add to your research documents and customer profiles.

Once again, the documents and 4:20 Research Method we’re about to show you will help you uncover and record those psychogrpahics. Whether you drop them into an avatar document is up to you.

In the next module, we’ll walk through the four research categories you can’t afford to skip. We’ll see you there.