If you've been anywhere near the world of marketing in the last few years, you've probably heard of the term "buyer persona." It's tossed out casually as if everyone has one and everyone knows what it is. But do you know what and how buyer personas can benefit your business?
In an ever-changing and increasing known fact in the digital world that a one-size-fits-all marketing approach no longer works. The growth of your business depends on your ability to effectively target the right audiences for your products and services. This involves creating detailed profiles, also known as buyer personas.
Now, what exactly is a Buyer Persona?
According to HubSpot, a buyer persona is “a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.” A buyer persona should describe who your ideal customers are, what their days are like, the challenges they face and how they make decisions.
It’s common to have multiple buyer personas for a business - for example, if the end-user of your product needs to gain the approval of others before making a purchase, each individual involved in that decision is a separate persona. They'll have different criteria for evaluating your product, and you'll need different strategies to address those needs.
Why are Buyer Personas important?
In business, it’s important to know as much as possible about your target audience, and the businesses and people who will ideally be buying your products or services. Within this group, the audiences and the way they use your product or service and how they apply it will likely be very different. Which means that in order to speak to those customers, a one-size-fits-all approach wouldn’t be effective. Instead, each action should be targeted down to the segment of buyers that share similar characteristics. Buyer personas take that segmentation even further to allow you to target your communications with precision.
How do you create a Buyer Persona?
These are the characteristics that you should consider when you are creating a buyer persona for your business:
- Demographic information: age, gender, and geographic location
- Psychographic information: interests, hobbies, and aspirations
Here's an example of a persona description:
“Anna is 30, she is not married yet and lives alone in Tanjong Pagar. She cares for her skin. She is already using products for the wellbeing of the body and prefers ones with natural ingredients. She likes to do outdoor activities and uses her free time to walk her dog, go for a run or go trekking in the mountains. She uses social media to post photos of her outdoor tours. Since she's extremely tech-savvy, she does a lot of online shopping, especially buying books, home appliances or technology products. Pragmatic and solar, she is attentive to the quality of life and affections.”
In conclusion, if someone asks what is a Buyer Persona, we can affirm that it is an evolution of the concept of a target audience. But it is also important to remember that we need to create a strong relationship with customers, and that starts with filling a need. Buyer Persona is the beginning of a new trip: customer loyalty.
Using Buyer Personas, businesses can create a strategy to attract customers, and this might include the creation of blog posts, social media campaigns, and webinars that those personas would find of value for their business or goals. This also includes the website. HubSpot mentioned that targeting your website to specific buyer personas made those sites 2 to 5 times easier to use by those target audiences. This means that your website should have content of interest and value targeted to those buyer personas. With personalisation, you’re not just targeting a market segment or a Buyer Persona, you’re talking directly to a person, which is your customer.
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