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Stop Guessing: Find Your Ideal Customers With Buyer Personas

by Tanya January 20, 2025

Every business has a target audience.

You can shout at everyone, or you can speak directly to the people who care. That’s the difference between noise and connection.

How to find your ideal target audience using Buyer Personas

A Buyer Persona is a detailed description of your target customer.

This includes an understanding of who they are, what they like and value and what motivates them, but also what they perceive as barriers to buying from you.

Buyer Personas help to improve the relevance of your digital marketing campaigns across organic, paid and earned media.

Too often marketers use their gut feeling to make assumptions about their customers.

As a result, they use corporate-speak and buzzwords that don’t really mean anything to their customers.

If you want to remain relevant in today’s busy marketplace, you must find a unique way to stand out.

Here is an example of a buyer persona visualised:

buyer persona example

Buyer personas are used to create better sales pages, better blog posts, better emails, and ad campaigns. And in turn, allow businesses to enjoy much higher conversion rates.

How to create a Buyer Persona

1. Start with data-backed guesses

Call them what you want—educated guesses, hypotheses, assumptions. The point is, you start somewhere.

Look at your website analytics. Google Analytics. Google Ads. Whatever data you’ve got, use it to ask questions like:

Who’s visiting?

What do they earn?

When are they online?

What device are they using?

Are they scrolling Instagram or reading blogs?

For example, let’s say you notice something: “Peer-to-peer lenders visit at least three content pages before converting.” That’s not just data—that’s insight. You can use it to shape a strategy. Content, campaigns, media. It’s your first clue.

2. Test your guesses

Now it’s time to test if your assumption holds water.

Go back to the data. Does at least 70% of your audience fit the profile? If yes, you’re onto something. If no, tweak it and try again.

This isn’t about being right straight away—it’s about zeroing in on what works.

3. Find the patterns

Here’s where it gets interesting.

Start grouping your audience. Look for clusters. Patterns. Behaviors. “If someone does X, they’re likely to do Y.”

For example, if they’re reading about product A, are they also browsing product B? Or do they always visit at lunchtime?

When you see the patterns, you’re no longer guessing. You’re learning.

4. Go beyond the obvious

Your website gives you a good start, but it’s only part of the picture. If you stop there, you’re missing out.

Use external tools to dig deeper:

✔️ YouGov: Paid, but worth it for consumer insights.

✔️ Consumer Barometer (Google): Free and packed with internet usage data.

✔️ SimilarWeb: Get the bigger picture across markets and devices.

✔️ Google Surveys: Ask questions, get answers.

✔️ AnswerThePublic: What are people asking about your industry?

The point is to find people like your current audience—on platforms, in markets, or with habits you haven’t tapped into yet.

Look at who’s already buying from businesses like yours. Your competitors have done some of the hard work—use it. Who are they targeting? What’s working for them? More importantly, what are they missing?

Additionally, ZoomInfo and Clari Groove recently came up with a new collaboration that helps you import customer data from other software platforms, like Salesforce, etc. It’ll help you find patterns and clues about your audience. What do they click on? Where do they hang out online? This isn’t guesswork, it’s evidence.

5. Build the Persona

Now you’ve got the data, turn it into something useful: a buyer persona.

Make it specific. Give it a name, a face, an age. “This is Sarah, she’s 35, earns $50k, and shops online after 9 PM.”

Why? Because when you know Sarah, you know how to talk to her.

6. Stay flexible

Here’s the trick no one tells you: people change.

Sarah today might not be Sarah tomorrow. Maybe her budget shifts. Maybe her interests evolve.

Your job? Adapt. Don’t treat buyer personas like a fixed sculpture. They’re more like clay—shape them as the market changes.

7. Test, don’t assume

Run your campaigns. See what works. Does Sarah click on your ad? Does she buy your product?

And make sure every campaign follows SMART goals:

✔️ Specific

✔️ Measurable

✔️ Attainable

✔️ Relevant

✔️ Timely

If it works, great. If it doesn’t, don’t panic—adjust and try again.

Marketing isn’t a one-and-done game. It’s a cycle:

✔️ Test

✔️ Assess

✔️ Tweak

If your campaign hits its goals, double down. If it doesn’t, go back to the data. The audience is telling you something—listen to them.

Think about the person who’d benefit most from your product. Give them a face. An age. A name. How much do they earn? Where do they live? What’s bugging them? The clearer the picture, the easier it is to talk to them.

Why targeting isn’t about excluding

Some people argue that focusing on a target audience means shutting people out. “What if we miss someone?” they say. But here’s the thing: you’re already missing them if you’re trying to talk to everyone.

It’s not about saying no to people—it’s about saying yes to the right ones. Here’s why it works:

Less waste, more results

Marketing to everyone is expensive and inefficient. Focus on the right people, and your budget goes further, with better results.

Stickiness matters

When your message resonates, people remember. And when people remember, they come back. That’s loyalty.

Outsmart, don’t outspend

Knowing your audience better than your competitors gives you an edge money can’t buy. You don’t need the loudest voice—you need the smartest one.

Why are Buyer Personas so important?

Here’s the thing: most businesses waste money on marketing. Why? Because they’re guessing.

Guessing who their customers are. Guessing what those customers want. Guessing what might work.

Guesswork is expensive. And it doesn’t get results.

Buyer Personas take the guesswork out.

They’re not about what you think is best. They’re about what your customers actually need.

What keeps them awake at night?

What’s stopping them from buying?

What problems are you solving for them?

Personalised marketing isn’t a luxury anymore—it’s survival. And Buyer Personas are where it starts.

Because when you know who you’re talking to, you don’t just get attention—you get action.

And that’s what moves the needle.

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Tanya

The first Millennial blogger in the UK. Twitter @_luckyattitude

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