How well do you know your target audience? You may understand the basic demographics of your customer base, but gaining a deeper understanding can take your marketing to the next level. There are many tools that can help grow your understanding of your audience. One of these tools is a buyer persona.

A buyer persona is a representation of a member of your target audience. It’s a prototype—it doesn’t represent a specific individual, but it does have characteristics that many individual customers have. The goal is not to replicate one buyer’s identity in complete accuracy. It’s to better understand the motivations and pain points of the average customer in order to hone your marketing focus.

By creating a persona, you’ll be able to more easily identify and nurture potential leads. Knowing characteristics of your ideal customer will help you offer the kind of content or marketing campaign that will attract members of your priority audiences. For instance, if you knew that your target audience prefers to learn about solutions through informative blog posts, you wouldn’t create a video to get the word out about a new product. Customizing a brand experience to have maximum impact with the people you want to reach is possible with the greater audience understanding a buyer persona gives.

A buyer persona is created through a combination of research and intuitive knowledge. There are several ways that you can research information for a buyer persona. You can interview former and current customers in-depth or send them an online survey to better understand their decision-making process and why they chose your company. You can also talk to those in your company who deal directly with customers, such as sales representatives. Once you know more information about your customers, you can fill in the information you don’t know. For instance, if your customers say they chose your company because it had an efficient solution, you can conclude that efficiency is important to your customers and a point of strength for your business.

Here are some questions that a good buyer persona will answer:

• What causes a buyer to become a customer of your product? What problems are buyers seeking solutions to?
• Where does this buyer search for information?
• What influences this buyer’s decision? What does he or she find most critical in making a decision?
• What kind of messages or content does this buyer find helpful?
• How much influence does this person have in the buying process?
• What concerns might the buyer have about your product or service?
• What industry does the buyer work in? What organization role/job title does he or she have?
• How old is the buyer? Male or female? What level of education does the buyer have?

Some of these questions can be answered using information from your research. Others can be answered using what you already know. Once you have this information, you can write up the buyer persona as you would a biography.

Of course, creating the buyer persona is only the first step. Once you have the persona, use it as a starting point to create content that will appeal to your ideal buyer at every stage of the decision-making process, from exploring ideas to making the final decision. If your existing content does not address the most common issues or questions your buyer persona has, create new content that better addresses these topics. A buyer persona can also help you create goals for a marketing campaign, identify a qualified lead, and determine how you should promote your content. With this tool, you can make your marketing efforts more targeted—and increase the chance that your message will reach the right people.

Here are some other helpful resources to learn more about buyer personas:

What is a buyer persona? Buyer Persona Institute Website

Marketo’s buyer persona worksheet Marketo

How to Develop Your Buyer Persona and Reel In Better Customers Forbes Marketing Blog

How To Create Personas Hubspot Guides