Buyer personas are extremely useful in retail. Through imagining traits and preferences common to your prospective customers, you can derive some valuable insight into how you should shape your content and target your selling points. Everyone wants to generate more leads, after all, so why not use every trick in the book?

If you’ve yet to use them, though, you might wonder what the practical process of building them actually involves. After all, different brands use different methods: some include more detail than others, or focus more on specific aspects of the personas.

This essential guide to building great buyer personas will swiftly move through the vital steps, explaining why they’re necessary and what you need to achieve. Let’s begin:

Consider your prospective customers

Before you can get anything done, you need to think carefully about the people who might want to buy from you. You can make this easier by taking existing sales records into account, but you should have a fairly good idea of how broadly your products appeal to people. What’s the USP of your business? If you sell general groceries, then maybe your target audience is almost everyone. If you operate in a niche, you’ll be able to rule a lot of people out. The more targeted you get with this initial audience, the easier the following steps will be.

Group them by relevant factors

This is the first area in which businesses tend to differ, because there are so many viable factors and so many ways in which to categorize people and purchases. You could group by season, identifying the “Winter shopper” and the “Summer shopper” and noting where their requirements differ. You could also group by frugality, comparing the “Wealthy buyer” to the “Bargain hunter”.

There’s age, location, sex, religion, political affiliation, nationality, education level, interest, personality type… the list goes on almost indefinitely, and every retailer picks out a unique selection. The main takeaway is that you shouldn’t worry about covering everything. Instead, look at the extremes for a particular factor and answer one question: how significantly does this change how the shopper should be targeted?

For instance, wealth is going to be a huge factor if you have moderately-priced items: the “Wealthy buyer” will want to be convinced that your items are sufficiently luxurious, while you’ll need to persuade the “Bargain hunter” that they offer value for money. If you only sell luxury items, though, there may be little sense in using wealth-related personas: after all, you shouldn’t be targeting people with modest incomes at all.

Add detail based on real-world data

Having been through various factors and selected only the disparities that are the most consequential for your brand, you then need to start adding the kind of detail that will make your personas useful. Let’s use that “Bargain hunter” example again: why are they trying to save money? Perhaps they don’t make much money in the first place, or they have major outgoings (several kids, for instance), or maybe they’re simply very careful with how they spend.

When you add details like “Has children” or “Has a low income”, you may find that it makes sense to start splintering your personas, or even rearranging them from the top down. This is perfectly fine, and you should do what makes the most sense for your business. Just remember to add the most information to the most valuable personas.

As for how you come up with this detail, you can simply focus on hypotheticals, but it makes sense to use all the real-world data you can get. Look through your sales data, talk to your existing customers, and even use things like Facebook’s rich targeting categories to guide your decisions. What you want to avoid is imagining complex buyer personas that don’t actually exist in reality, making any efforts to use them ultimately ineffective.

That’s the process for creating great buyer personas. If it seems simple, that’s because it is. You pick out your target audience, split it into notable groups based on significant factors, and flesh out the identities of the average group members using existing data. The resulting personas can be used to inform everything from your pricing to your content strategy, so if you’re not using them yet, it’s a great time to get started.