The buyer persona is a detailed description of a typical person coming to your website in need of a particular thing. She doesn’t necessarily “buy” something with her money: she could download a white paper or subscribe to your newsletter – IF that’s what you want her to do.

If you have several different products or services, you probably have more than one persona in need of something you offer.

Each buyer persona will seek information in a different way. It’s the job of your website producer to define and design that path (that’s a whole other blog post, folks!) from words and pictures to calls-to-action to point-of-purchase (Ka-CHING!).

What’s the Action you want your persona to take?

That Action (resulting in money for you –  the Ka-CHING!) could be the downloading of your free ebook in exchange for an email address (you can continue to connect with later on); an actual purchase of a product on an ecommerce site; a donation to your non-profit organization; a phone call or contact form filled out by a hot prospect. Whatever action you want people to take on your website, should result in money for you, either immediately or within days of first contact.

Example of buyer personas for a Plastic Surgeon’s website

Later on in this post, I’ll give you another example of a buyer persona for a career coach. For my main example, I’ll use a cosmetic surgeon’s (plastic surgeon) website, which would have several personas. Here are five but note that I haven’t defined them (yet) to the level of detail I’m urging you to define yours. We’ll do that in the next step

Personas for a Plastic Surgeon’s Website:

  • College-age woman seeking breast augmentation
  • Mother with young children, seeking a mommy-makeover
  • Baby boomer-aged woman seeking age-reducing enhancements
  • Burn victims and breast cancer survivors
  • Men in need of surgery or other treatments to enhance their youth

To make it easier and less confusing to your buyer personas visiting your website, you could group those examples into two groups: 1.) male and female; and 2.) medical.

The female group has three main personas: 1.) college-age; 2.) young mom; 3.) over-45 year old women.

The male group could have two: 1.) weight-loss (men who have recently lost a large amount of weight and are in need of surgery to remove loose skin) and 2.)  men over 45-years old.

The third group could be personas in need of breast augmentation after surviving breast cancer or burn victims in need of skin grafting.