How to create a Buyer Profile

In this blog post, I’m going to be walking you through the process of creating a buyer profile.

As long as you do it right, creating an accurate buyer profile should only cost you the time it takes to gather your information and organize it.

What is A Buyer Profile?

I gave an overview of buyer profiles and what to do with them in a post a while back, but I realize I didn’t give very much information on getting the information you need to create that profile. Because of that lack of information, I thought it would be a good idea to fill in the gap.

To spare you the time of having to read through my previous blog post I’ll just give a quick summary of buyer profiles for anyone who isn’t familiar with them...

Definition: A buyer profile is a list of criteria a person would have to meet before they would either want or need your product/service.

Creating a Buyer Profile for an Existing Product/Service

If you already have a product or service available, creating a good buyer profile should be fairly easy.

First off, you need to make a list of your product or service’s features and benefits. When I say “make a list” I don’t mean just take a glance at your product and jot down why the different knobs and switches are a nice feature. You need to go deeper than that and pull out every single reason your customer would and should want what you’re offering.

I learned this early on in my copywriting training when we were assigned to create a sheet listing a certain product’s features and how each feature benefited the user. Do you want to know what product we were supposed to analyze?

It was a pencil. Not a foot-long pencil with flashing lights running down the sides or a swiss army knife attached to one end, just a regular number 2 pencil. 

Now, at first glance, you may think that’s a pretty silly thing for my course to require. After all, a pencil only has two functions: write and erase. The best anyone could come up with is an elongated description of how a pencil allows you to fix mistakes that would otherwise be permanent. Right?

Wrong. Once I sat down and focused my mind on the ordinary pencil in my hand I began noticing how its simple structure had a lot of benefits to offer the user... 

• The way the pencil was shaped gave you the benefit of grasping it easier.

• The color made it easy to see if you were studying in the park and dropped your pencil on the grass. 

• The graphite would make perfect lines, whereas the ball of a pen sometimes won’t pick up ink properly and you have to swirl it around on a paper just to get it to work again.

I even came up with more silly benefits like how you could pull the eraser out and flatten the metal part to create a back scratcher.

As I said, it’s fairly easy to find a product’s benefits if you just take the time to do it.

Now that you have your list, you need to use it and determine what kind of person would need those benefits. A high schooler would need the benefit of easily finding the pencil in the grass, and an aspiring artist would need the benefit of erasing any mistakes they might have made while using their sketchbook.

And there’s your buyer profile!

Age: 7 and up

Gender: both

Description: School kids and adults who need cheap writing utensils that won't stain clothing or furniture and are easy to use and hard to misplace.

Creating a Buyer Profile to Guide you in Product/Service Development

Another reason you might want to create a buyer profile is so you have a guide while choosing what products or services your business wants to offer in the future. Creating this buyer profile will require a bit more research on your part than the previous buyer profile we created.

Instead of looking at a product for information, we’ll need to look at the buyer market. Since I used pencils in the previous example, I’ll go ahead and use them for this one too.

You are the proud owner of PencilCompany and you’re trying to come up with new products to boost sales and appeal to a larger marketing demographic. Your first step is to look at your existing clients…

Age: 7 and up

Gender: both

Description: School kids and adults who need cheap writing utensils that won't stain clothing or furniture and are easy to use and hard to misplace.

That’s a fairly broad spectrum so to get more sales you should develop a few products for more specialized buyers.

For example: If you hop onto the computer and look up different types of pencils you’ll quickly learn that there are a lot of brands selling specialized pencils for artists. That would be a good area for PencilCompany to expand in, so you’ll need to shift your research focus completely onto artists.

Now that you have a general idea of who your new art pencils will cater to, it's time to go deeper. Are you selling your pencils on your website to people all over the country, or are you looking to sell locally? If most of your orders will come from your local area, whether they be from collaborations with other stores or your own brick-and-mortar business, then that's where you should start.

Find out what the local artistic crowd looks for when shopping for supplies, pencils to be specific. Is the price tag the biggest factor in their buying habits or are they looking for a specific size and color of graphite?

It’s also a good idea to ask what they don’t like about the pencils they’re using now. Maybe they don’t like how their graphite keeps breaking while sharpening the pencil. Maybe they wish there was an attachment for gently sharpening the tip of their pencils to a fine point for the tiny details they want to add to their sketches. Take all of that information and then use it to create a pencil that will meet those desires.

Another avenue of information is doing a little competitive research to find out the kinds of art pencils your competitors are selling. While browsing the features their pencils offer, make sure to read their customer reviews, especially the negative ones. That will give you even more ideas for the features your pencil should have.

Once you’ve compiled all of your research it’s time to make the buyer profile for your new “Strong Sketch Art Pencil with ultra-fine tip sharpener …

Age: 14 and up

Gender: both

Area: FakeTown, Minnesota.

Description: People who like to sketch and want strong pencils that don’t have cracked graphite in the center and artists who need a tool that can sharpen just the very tip of the pencil so they can add small details without having to use a regular sharpener every few seconds.

Now you can start working on your new masterpiece. 

You’ll have to hunt around for some of your information on blogs and groups in your community, but usually, people are fine with you asking them a few simple questions as long as you don’t get too pushy or ask intrusive/personal questions.