Buyer Persona Template: What to offer to people looking for more than just products

In the previous 2 episodes, we talked about why you should create buyer persona templates and how to actually create them in the most profitable way.

The question now is: With such powerful data, what should we offer? Also, how to represent your Buyer Persona so everybody on your team understands it.

What does a Buyer Persona Template look like?

If you just found this episode, I highly recommend you come back 2 episodes back to empower you with the background knowledge we will use here.

Today, we’re going to talk about: What to offer to empowered buyer personas looking for more than just products and how to represent those personas for decision making clarity and bottom line profitability.

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How to approach Buyer Personas in different stages of the Buyer’s Journey

In the last episode we outlined the idea that buyer personas are not static beings, but they are moving somewhere and it’s your job, as a brand, to steer that movement to the bottom of your sales funnel.

To do that, we combined buyer personas to a buyer’s journey.

We learned how many Buyer Personas we need and how to place them into different stages of your sales funnel.

The next piece of this puzzle is to realize what you have to offer in each of those stages.

Why is that?

Because buyer personas, in different buyer stages, need different communication strategies.

Otherwise, as said before, a broad communication approach will be like throughing pieces of paper on a fan expecting them to fall into a small bucket.

A few of them will, by chance, while most of them will fly elsewhere.

We don’t want that to happen, do we?

So, let’s unfold what kind of offers, for every buyer’s journey stage, you can apply.

So here’s what we gonna do. We will approach every sales funnel stage and outline which message or approach we should focus on.

Remember that we are following Eugene Schwartz model for this.

If you want to know more about the sales funnel stages we’re about to discuss, just go back to the previous episodes to know more.

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What to offer Buyer Personas in Stage 1: Unaware.

1. Self Awareness: People in this stage don’t know they have a problem. They need to know themselves. They need to understand that there’s an optimal version of themselves beyond their current status.
2. Brand Awareness: Give the opportunity to those people learn all that self awareness from you. There’s no sales pitch in this stage. Only service. You might think that serving instead of pitching is not profitable, but we also covered that in previous episodes when we talked about the low-pitch sales formula. So, in the long-term, your brand will benefit from reciprocity and make more sales.
3. Motivation: Knowing is not acting. Acting is not enough. Taking the right action is what’s necessary. To take the right action people need to either flee from something terrible or to pursuit something valuable and transformational. By bringing self awareness and brand awareness, you must add call-to-actions along the way that makes sense with that message.

What to offer Buyer Personas in Stage 2: Problem Aware.

1. Pain points realization: People need to know that you know how they feel. There’s a psychophysiological reason for that, but for now, I’ll ask you to trust me on that one. If you show them you know them better than themselves, they will trust you to guide them through the storm. Show that by bringing awareness and urgency to specific pain points.
2. Small wins: Realizing pain points is, well, painful and useless for your brand if you don’t provide transformation. The quickest way between a pain point and a transformational experience is what we can call a small win. It’s like a pain killer which it’s easier than a surgery. Break down possible solutions until the edge of meaning and distribute them along the way as breadcrumbs to treasure island.
3. Service, gratitude, and reciprocity: By offering a way out. A small win. You gain something more valuable than a sale. What can be more valuable than a sale? Multiple sales. One of the most valuable compliments people can give you is money. Money is sincere. If people are willing to buy from you multiple times, they trust you. That’s achieved by service, gratitude, and reciprocity.

What to offer Buyer Personas in Stage 3: Solution Aware.

1. Curiosity: What your buyer persona’s life can become by going through the next corner of your message? The one that’s behind the curtains of what you have already shown for free? That’s the core message here. What is their gain? What is their transformation? How better their lives can become? Make it clear that the answer lies with your products and services as a natural next step in their transformational journey.
2. Guidance: Now that we covered the what, it’s time to show them the how. How do your product can guide them through all the transformation they are seeking? How will their lives be on the other side of that purchase? Which guarantees you provide? How can you make it easier? How can you provide security? Do you offer guarantees? Your buyer personas are the heroes on a journey to find a better version of themselves, not your products. You are only a guide.
3. Solutions: Money is an energy that flows through a problem-solving stream. If you’re not solving problems, you are not making money. That might seems obvious but I see people establishing money-making goals all the time instead of problem-solving goals. So keep in mind that to make more money, you nee to solve more problems. You solve more problems using multiple streams of solutions.

What to offer Buyer Personas in Stage 4: Product Aware.

1. Identity: People in stage might be your customers already, fi not, they are at least, ready to buy. How do you serve them to find their own purpose is what will take them to the next stage, which is brand advocacy. The best way to do that is to provide people a better way of expressing themselves through your products and services, instead of just selling things they arguably need.
2. Reciprocity: Write this down. People don’t pay. They repay. What does that mean? It means that people will be ready to invest money on your business when they feel you earned that by serving them before. And that is not only fair. That’s good business. The best customers are the thankful ones. The deal here is to think about customer service, post-sales, follow-ups, next nurture cycle service.
3. Transformation: This is a tough one. Going from point A to point B is not a straight line. Why? Because to go from a good place to a better one, people need to go to a worse place first. That requires a big deal of motivation and trust. Your customers will keep going back if you not only show them the peak of the mountain, but also the equipment and shortcuts along the way. It’s really important that you make sure that your promise is fulfilled by your products and services. You do that by aligning your promise to what you will deliver. Don’t say you are rock’n roll if your products sound reggae.

What o offer Buyer Personas in Stage 5: Most Aware

1. Loyalty Loop: People in this stage are your brand advocates. They need to know The next steps in their journey. They already trusted you before, and now what’s in there for them? You have 2 options: 1) guide them to the next level of that same service thread or 2) guide them to a new service thread. The first option will lead to a vertical move to a higher ticket and the second option will lead to a horizontal move to the same ticket range sales. That’s what we call the loyalty loop.
2. Additional Offers and Prizes: Gifts, bundles, extra services and promotions are positives surprises you can deliver in a post-sales communication. If people trust your brand enough to make a purchase, they will love to know that you have more for them than you initially promised.
3. Long-Term Value: Making sure you deliver what you have promised in your sales proposition is mandatory, but that’s not enough to increase the value of your brand in the long-term. People are paying to have what you promised. The value comes from the “more-than-I-paid-for” effect. You can easily to that by leaving valuable aspects of your products and services as a secret sauce they will only know after buying. Additional services, bundles, special packages delivered to their home addresses, and more. You got the picture, right?

These are powerful offers that will only land to the specific buyer personas we created before.

You are now able to create the most profitable Buyer Persona Template for your brand, which is the proper representation of everything we covered so far.

So, the next step of our conversation is to learn what a Buyer Persona Template looks like.

We’re covering from basic demographics to advance psychological profiling in 5 stages. Are you with me?

Let’s cover this next.

Buyer Persona Template Part #1: Demographics

Demographics is all about how to categorize Personas based on their personal information. Think of it as a basic stage to help you tailor your message.

Name

The 2 most powerful words in any language and across every culture are:

• You: which is a direct address to someone.
• Name: a direct and intimate address to someone.

Address your audience by their names when possible. If it's not, use the second person - you.

Avoid speaking to mass audiences because you end up speaking to no one.

But here’s the catch, to address buyer personas by name, you must get that information as soon as possible during the Buyer’s Journey.

The most effective way of doing so is by converting prospects into email subscribers.

Age

Did you know that every word is associated with an age range? Check these words:

• Mom.
• Mother.
• Motherhood.

Words differ by complexity and by the age of people interested in that subject.

Why does that matter? The core idea is: the lower the age association, the easier it is to understand your message.

If you try to apply ages to those 3 words I mentioned, you will find that:

• The first one, mom, is for the youngest audience.
• The third one, motherhood, is for the oldest audience.
• And the second, mother, is somewhere in the middle.

Writers, screenwriters, and copywriters adjust the words to deliver a clear message. They use word grading metrics to establish goals for their messaging.

For example, The Flesch Reading-Ease is a readability score to test how easy a piece of content is by associating a score to a grade.

I’m leaving a link to a free online readability score tester and editor in the description. Don’t miss it. It’s gonna do wonders for your copywriting.

Marital status

This data can help you in various ways, depending on the products and services you provide:

Say you are in the wedding industry. You would like to address engaged single couples, not married ones.

On the other hand, if you are in the Relationship Counseling industry. You would like to address married couples.

What if you are in the Baby Clothing industry? You would like to address married couples in a certain age range.

You see, we start to combine those demographics to create a more specific buyer persona, and the more specific they are, the more powerful your message becomes.

Profession

Profession shows which areas of interest your Personas have.

• IT professionals are great Buyer Personas for computer companies.
• Lawyers are great Buyer Personas for tailored suit brands.
• Athletes are great Buyer Personas for running shoes companies.

One recent example is that COVID pandemic forced the hand around home office appliances industry.

Gender

You can use this data to understand how different men and women interact with your brand. That helps even if your products are not gender-specific.

Gender can influence your brand colors, brand images, and even, brand typography.

Also, men and women play different buying decision roles. Understanding the nuances between both is crucial.

Buyer Persona Template Part #2: Interests

Fortune cookies are well known for carrying hidden messages.

Lou Montulli coined the term cookie to name data transported from a browser to a web server.

Cookies record our:

• Preferences and interests.
• Employment status.
• Geolocation.

Just to name a few of them.

Cookies allow brands to create targeted ads like it was never possible before.

Using a tool like Google Ads, you can even target buyer personas that “in-market”, it means that, by their online surfing patterns, we can determine the they are looking for a purchase.

How crazy is that?

Buyer Persona Template Part #3: External Problems

External problems are tangible obstacles between people’s current state and their goals.

It manifests itself in the physical world and can be listed as pain points.

Addressing External Problems

In an External Problem scenario:

• Restaurants sell food.
• Plumbers fix pipes.
• Clothing stores sell shirts.

But the reason why people will get interested in doing business with you is not limited to solving external problems.

What I’m saying is that the purchase decision to eat at a certain restaurant is not only led by hunger.

Something else is going on.

And that “something” plays a a more powerful impact role in the final decision than just hunger.

Let’s find out what’s really going on.

Buyer Persona Template Part #4: Internal Problems

The anticipation and feeling around what could happen if those external problems occur leads us to Internal Problems.

Addressing Internal Problems

The purpose of external problems is to uncover internal ones. It is about helping your Buyer Personas answer the question: Do I have what it takes?

Your Buyer Persona might feel frustrated, Incomplete, or confused. But that is only a current situation.

Addressing those internal motivators that are being manifested externally, inspires the transformation they are looking for.

In an Internal Problem scenario:

• Restaurants sell health, social status, and identity.
• Plumbers sell family security, tranquility, and financial stability.
• Clothing stores sell an identity, comfort, and social status.

What internal problems your products solve? A restaurant that sells food will never lead the market. The appeal is too superficial to buyer personas needs.

Buyer Persona Template Part #5: Philosophical Problems

Philosophical Problems are about something larger than even the feelings about the problems. It is about the question “why”.

Why does it matter?

Philosophical Problems can be identified by the words “should” and “shouldn’t”. It is part of how they view themselves in the world.

Addressing Philosophical Problems

Your Buyer Personas need to get involved in stories greater than themselves.

They value brands that give them a voice in a larger narrative and provide a stronger sense of meaning.

In a Philosophical Problems scenario, people ask:

• Why should restaurants care about healthy food?
• Why should plumbers urge to be efficient and reliable?
• Why should clothing stores be inclusive?

Is there a larger cause your brand contributes to?

Are your products tools to fight back against what should not be or give birth to what must be?

Clothing stores using top models to showcase their products are not inclusive and will lose ground to other brands that understands the deep psychological questions of their buyer personas.

Did you get that?

Buyer Persona Templates to use as reference

All right. At this point you should know why your brand needs Buyer Personas, how to create one, and which information is relevant.

Now, Let me show you some examples of real buyer personas so you can see these concepts in action.

Make sure you understand the concepts we covered to translate these examples to your reality.

Shaw we?

BUYER PERSONA TEMPLATE #1: BUSY BOB

• Name: Busy Bob
• Age: 26
• Marital Status: Single
• Profession: Store Manager
• Gender: Male
• Location: New York City.
• Education: BA in Administration
• Interests: Online shopping, sports, travel
• External Problem: Difficulty finding shoes that fit his feet.
• Internal Problem: Lack of identity because he buys shoes that fit, instead of the ones he likes.
• Philosophical Problem: Why should he struggle between comfort and style?

BUYER PERSONA TEMPLATE #2: BRANDY DAY

• Name: Brandy Day
• Age: 37
• Marital Status: Married
• Profession: Psychotherapist
• Gender: Female
• Location: Los Angeles, CA.
• Education: BS in Psychology
• Interests: Lifestyle, healthy food, fashion
• External Problem: Not being able to travel.
• Internal Problem: Stress between geographical flexibility and financial stability.
• Philosophical Problem: Why should she keep herself from traveling more? Why should she focus more on her professional career than freedom? Why does the sense of going anywhere she wants matter?

BUYER PERSONA TEMPLATE #3: SAM SUMMERS

• Name: Sam Summers
• Age: 20
• Marital Status: Single
• Profession: Student
• Gender: Male
• Location: San Francisco, CA
• Education: Full-time interior design student.
• Interests: Home decor, design, and painting.
• External Problem: Not having enough money.
• Internal Problem: Being unable to help his family.
• Philosophical Problem: Why should he be a better student? Why should he get a degree? Why should he be able to make more money?

Feel free to get back to the concepts and compare the practical examples to apply to your business seamlessly.

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Well, today we talked about what to sell to people looking for more than just products. You understood that buyer personas are not just buyers, they are looking for transformation and identity. And there’s more going on with them than just external pain points.

This is the final part of a 3 episode based on Buyer Personas development. If you just got here now, make sure you go back to the previous episodes that will make a huge impact on your brand.

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