Admittedly, there’s no way to 100% know your buyers, but creating a buyer persona provides a good starting point for better understanding your audiences’ needs, desires, and frustrations, and provides direction through many potential pitfalls.

Buyer personas don’t determine the exact people you need to reach, but they help facilitate the gap between specificity and generality. The space between these two extremes offers the greatest range of opportunity in your marketplace.

Placing your full attention on an ultra-specific audience could give you definite results but limit future lead generation. On the other side, a general focus diminishes any sense of direction, running you at a higher risk of a wasted budget and a lower possibility for reaching the right people.

• Demographics cover the basic characteristics in your potential audience, like gender, age, income, and education level.

• Geographics is self-evident but important. If you’re targeting a U.S. consumer versus a European or Asian prospect, there would be obvious differences in consumption, lifestyle, etc., so don’t ignore this factor.
  
  
• Firmographics relate to business data points such as industry, job title, business size, and type of business. These data points can reveal important considerations about your buyer’s motivations. For example, if you have a B2B product, you may want to target upper management positions like CMOs, CEOs, or the procurement department.

Finally, creating a buyer persona also entails psychographics. These details dig into the psychological motivations of the prospect including beliefs, interests, and lifestyle choices. This can include not just knowing what your audience likes, but also its frustrations. These may not be data points you can target, but evaluating potential disruptions to audience members’ needs and desires gives a more complete picture into their minds. This not only lets you convey how your brand can eliminate these frustrations, but also avoid playing into them.