When it comes to running a successful retail business, one of the key components is being aware of your ideal customer. stuff4yourclub keeps track of a buyer persona to ensure that our efforts contain the right message and are reaching the right people.

Steps to identify groups of buyers

To define our buyer personas, we identify the broad groups of consumers that we have. With the use of purchase data to weed out wholesalers and bulk buyers (if that’s applicable) — the best data for developing our buyer personas is what we know about our end customers.
Then we take the time to take a look at our product(s) and think broadly about who is making purchases — are most consumers buying for themselves or are your items typically purchased as gifts for others or for business purpose? Is your stock sold mostly around certain holidays? Are some items specific to certain demographics, like apparel, promotional, awards & plaques, signage?

Identify Key Information

After defining our customers into broad categories, we will identify what more granular information we need to create the personas. Responsive Inbound Marketing outlines the following as the major questions you’ll need to answer to move forward:

• Location: Where do people from this persona live?
• Excluding Location: Where do people from this persona not live?
• Age: What is the age range of this persona?
• Gender: What is the gender of people in this persona?
• Interests: What are the interests of people in this persona?
• Education Level: What is the education level of this persona?
• Job Title: What field of work do your customer work in, and what types of job titles do they carry?
• Income Level: What is the income range of this buyer persona?
• Relationship Status: What is the relationship status of this buyer persona?
• Language: What languages do people in this persona speak?
• Favorite Websites: Why type of websites do people in this persona frequent?
• Buying Motivation: What are this persona’s reasons for buying your product?
• Buying Concerns: What are this persona’s concerns when buying your product?

Going through all of the information above will give a more insight of the customers that we are dealing with.

Gather Information

Now that we’ve identified the information that we need to build our buyer personas, we start gathering data and intel. Starting with the information we already have about our customers with customer data from account setups, contest submissions, or newsletter subscriptions, to build the buyer personas.
For those using stuff4yourclub POS, you can access this data in customer profiles. Scrolling through customer data as well as their order history can be enlightening when crafting your buyer personas, so take some time to peruse the area in your point-of-sale system.
If you haven’t used customer accounts before, consider utilizing this important tool in the future to save customer information and track order histories.