Who is the buyer persona and how do we produce one?
About the buyer persona
A buyer persona, also known as a customer personality, is a fictional person who has been inspired and brought to life by our target customer group. Market research and information gathering are essential to make it a reality, but in return we will get a well-functioning model that authentically represents our customers and will be easy to work with. In fact, the buyer persona is the ideal customer for a company, the more detailed and thorough we know, the more functional it will be. In such a personality, we summarize the common characteristics of the optimal customers, they serve as quasi-sample customers in the subsequent creation of marketing strategies.
Why should we make buyer persona?
1. Because we can target more specifically: if we create a target group based solely on demographic data, the essence is taken away from it: personality. Our message will be more general, we cannot reflect with it on the problems that appear specifically for a persona.
2. It demarcates content types and channels: if we know where and what they are reading or watching, for how long, it becomes obvious where and what their questions are about our content as well. The golden rule is to talk about their problems, in their language, in the channels they follow.
What do we need to know about the buyer persona?
In short: everything we can. That is, the more we know, the more accurate the picture we get of them and the more personal the relationship with them will be. To use a common example: the better we know someone, the easier it is for them to choose the perfect gift. This is also the case in sales, the more exact our image of the buyer person is, the smoother we will find our way to it.
“Profiling”
In order for these buyer personalities to be “real,” that is, workable, it is essential that we gather as much information as possible about them and prioritize this information appropriately. For example, residency is less relevant to a website development company than to a coffee shop, whereas knowledge of gender is essential for a cosmetics online store. Analyzing the market and customer goals, incorporating demographic and psychographic data is vital to creating the right persona.
1. Get to know our target audience! A little research work will definitely be needed to understand who makes up our target group and to be able to use real data. The best way to do this is based on our current customers: who are the ones who regularly buy from us or are interested in our content? Do they have anything in common at first glance? If so, our customer personality is already alive and has its first characteristic.
2. Let's be proactive! If we don't have enough information about our clientele, let's get it! An e-mail questionnaire can be the perfect tool for this, but it will also be worth looking around among our social media followers: we’ll find plenty of valuable demographic data there. It is important to note that when building a persona, we should also take into account our previous bad customer experiences so that we can avoid these personality traits becoming part of the personality of our ideal client.
3. Let’s prioritize, categorize! Once we have gathered a sufficient amount of information, it is advisable to filter it out and look for the most common points, the most common similar traits, as we need to focus on these in building the persona. At this point, we can also identify the channels on which we will be able to communicate most effectively, and it will also shed light on the problems that the message should be about.
4. Identify the most important aspects:
- Demographic and geographic data (Gender, age, place of residence, education, marital status, job, etc.)
- Psychographic data (Consumer habits, price sensitivity, interests, hobbies, values, problems and fears, etc.)
- Behavioral data (Media consumption habits, shopping frequency, information, etc.)
5. Create several types of personas! Our clientele is probably not covered by a single persona, so we define and differentiate individual personalities for diverse and successful marketing. For example, if we sell cakes, there will be dessert lovers who choose from a narrowed palette due to a food allergy and are likely to be vegans who do the same - and while these two persona may be very similar, it is advisable to consider them as separate personalities. Likewise, a company that sells sports equipment should treat hobby and professional athletes as separate personalities, as they buy from them for a fundamentally different purpose.
6. Make content for them! Once the personas are done and possibly given them a name and a “face,” all they have to do is start communicating with them. We already have a lot of knowledge about them, so it won’t be that hard to offer them personal and quite unique!
In the long run, it is also necessary for continuous and valuable communication not to see these personas as a round whole that are ready and untouchable. On the contrary, just as human personalities change, so do customer personalities, and at any time we may come across information we did not know about them until then. So feel free to view each of our personalities as “open files” and add all the new information to their profile so they will be really timeless and useful.
