What is a Buyer Persona? And who is Sarah?
If your name is Sarah, I don’t know whether to apologize to you or hug you.
You, my dear Sarah, are my buyer persona (sometimes also called Brand Persona). You are to whom I write every newsletter…every blog…every Instagram post - they are all written singularly for you.
You, Sarah, are my ideal customer. You are a fictional version of my target (awesome, ideal, fantasy-yet-reality) client.
When I dream of the clients that I want to hire me to help them execute their marketing strategy, it is YOU I dream of. I’ve gone through exercise after exercise to get down to who you are and what problems you need solved.*
So who is my Sarah?
Age: 42-50
Role: VP of Marketing
Salary: $250K (hey…my ideal is also an ideal for Sarah…equal pay for equal work - let’s do this)
Personal: Mother of two school-age children (one boy, one girl) + one dog (Sammy). She got married when she was 24yrs old to Mark, who she met at a bar after college. She loves to workout (her Peloton bike is her sanctuary away from stress) and she loves her family fiercely. Her girlfriends are her sounding board for all things in life and they catch up over a glass of wine whenever possible.
Sarah’s Typical Day:
6:15am-7:45am: Wake up, meditate and exercise. Organize her day because a day that isn’t well-organized is a mess in her house
8:00am-8:45am: She and hubby (Mark) tag-team to feed the kids and get them out the door.
9:00am-12:30pm: Slay the morning
12:30pm-1:15pm: Walk the dog, Sammy, and enjoy the fresh air
1:15-1:30pm: Throw together a salad for lunch
1:30pm-5:30pm: Slay the afternoon
5:30pm-6:30pm: Relieve the afternoon nanny and pull together a prepped meal (weekly meal delivery services are her favorite…her family eats healthy, fresh food and she feels like she cooked…win-win)
6:30pm-8:30pm: Family eats dinner together, plays Monopoly Deal and preps for the next day
Sarah’s Challenges:
Completing projects at work. Her manager calls her a superstar, but she is constantly concerned she won’t “one-up” herself from her previous project.
Feeling like there isn’t enough time in the day/week/month/year.
Struggling between being grateful for a career she loves and experiencing Groundhog’s Day to just get through the week with the kids & hubby unscathed.
Prioritizing her relationship to Mark, her husband. Date nights don’t get scheduled nearly enough, but she knows they love each other and are just “in the weeds”!
How I Help:
Sarah and I are introduced through a mutual friend. Sarah shares some of her concerns and challenges. We hit it off immediately at our first meeting and decide to grab a glass of wine to get into the nitty-gritty.
She has some really creative ideas that she would love to try out, but doesn’t have the time to oversee the process. I get a chance to listen to her goals, her past wins and losses, and am able to give a fresh perspective of ways to approach the marketplace.
We decide on a budget to get started with a first project. I am SO excited because I really like Sarah and want her to succeed. We have clear communication and I start to feel that giddy feeling of being an extension of someone else’s brain.
Six months in and we are finishing each other’s sentences. Our first concept hit the target and sales increased beyond our stated goals. We tweaked a few concepts along the way and sales skyrocketed. Sarah gets promoted to SVP of Marketing and decides to take a 3 week trip with her family to celebrate. She isn’t worried about leaving for time off because she knows she has grown a strong team and they are capable of handling everything while she is gone. She comes back refreshed and we start all over again with a new project!
* If you own your own business and haven’t done one of these exercises yet, DO IT NOW! When we try to speak to everybody, we speak to nobody.