How to Define Buyer Personas for Your Business?
04 de May de 2022
04 de May de 2022
Writing down the recipients in a letter is fundamental in order for the message to get to its destination. Defining a buyer persona is as fundamental as that when it comes to developing a strategy for our product or service.
Traditional marketing used to define possible clients to whom we wanted to communicate as target audiences. However, the great variety of buyer profiles that exist nowadays has made it insufficient to categorise these audiences by age, gender or socioeconomic status if we want to make efficient strategic decisions or choose a direction. But, what is a buyer persona? And, which are the keys to successfully defining ours?
Buyer personas are client archetypes in which, besides taking into account demographic characteristics of the targets, other types of additional information are included — such as habits, needs, behaviours, motivations and fears that most of them have in common. For example:
Target: Men between 30-50 years old, medium/high socioeconomic status.
Buyer persona: Oscar is 35 years old, single, and works as an economist at a multinational company, which leads him to spend several hours of his day moving from one place to the next. He has an interest in fashion, sports and film. He uses the time he has on the flights he takes in order to consume entertainment on any of those three typologies. One of his concerns is not to have enough time to keep in shape and he dreams of living near the beach.
Defining a buyer persona helps us understand who we’re addressing in order to know how to get to them in the right way and satisfy their needs. That’s why this is one of the most important steps when it comes to establishing any marketing campaign or commercial strategy inside a company.
These are some of the benefits we’ll get from defining our buyer persona:
Understanding your clients: This is, hands down, the most relevant benefit. Knowing your audience well will have an impact in the way you communicate with them, making it more efficient, but it will also impact your company’s day to day work. If all of your employees know where you’re headed, processes become much more agile.
Defining the tone:Using a tone and a style with which our audiences can identify will make it much easier to reach them.
Defining the topics: In the same way, knowing the interests of the people we’re addressing will allow us to find topics with which to attract them.
Being present in the right channels:Is your buyer persona the Facebook type or more of an Instagrammer? You better know that before launching a paid campaign.
Optimising budget: The percentage of messages that we’ll send and won’t get to their destination will be much lower if we know how and where to find our audiences. This will help us have more impact for much less money.
Knowing which problems to address: You may have a product that offers plenty of benefits, but knowing which one is the one that will bring solutions to your client’s biggest problems and focusing on them is what will make the difference.
1| Name them
Beyond the romanticism, naming our buyer personas will allow us to identify them. Brands and companies can have more than one buyer persona and, in this way, it will be possible to differentiate them.
2| Define their job and family situation
Let’s ask those questions that your parents would ask about the person you’re dating: Do they study or work? What do they do? What’s their salary range? What have they done prior to this? What are their families like? How many are there? This will help us understand their needs and routines.
3| Define the demographics
A classic that we will also use for defining the target. Age, gender, socioeconomic status and location. This information will help us do better segmentations.
4| Behaviour
Not as in a mother’s perspective, but rather thinking about how users navigate the internet.
Do they read blogs?
Which social networks do they use?
Do they use email?
What type of content do they consume?
This will help us understand which channels are the best if we want to get in touch with them.
5| Dreams
This is one of the additional values of buyer personas as opposed to the traditional target: knowing their goals, challenges or concerns that our clients have will allow us to bring unknown data to light and create stronger connections with them. In order to do this, we must ask ourselves:
Which are their goals in life?
Which challenges are they facing?
Which are their dreams?
Can our product or service be of any use to any of these questions and make their journey an easier one?
6| Our product, our turn
Now that we know our buyer persona better, it’s time to ask ourselves some questions:
What can I offer?
What can stop them from consuming my product or service?
What can seem attractive to them from our competitors?
Which of my products or services, or which of their benefits better adapts to this buyer persona?
For this last one, it’s really important that we put ourselves in the shoes of the archetype we’re developing. Empathy and intuition are needed in order to understand both the good and the bad thoughts they can have. Creating a profile like this is also helpful for keeping ahead of the client’s complaints.
Truth is, the amount of data we need in order to elaborate our buyer persona is huge, but there are some tools that can help us in this task. For example: Google Trends, Google Ads or Google Analytics. On the other hand, there are also specific tools to create buyer personas that can guide us along the way. Some examples are Xeerpa, Xtensio, Market Hax or Hubspot.