Buyer Persona: The key to the success of your digital strategy

For all your marketing efforts to bear fruit, it is not enough just to segment your target audience, you have to know how they think, how they act, but, above all, how they buy . For this reason, I share a guide to understand what it is and how you could define your Buyer Persona.

What is the Buyer Persona ?

The buyer persona is the profile of the ideal consumer, which is also the key to the success of any marketing campaign or strategy. For this same reason, brands and companies concentrate all their efforts to build it properly and thus obtain the best results in terms of sales.

The ideal consumer is different for each type of company and sector and is defined by the proposals of each brand. This profile will help create well-directed efforts, since not everything works for everyone and offering the wrong product or service to someone can cause a lot of damage.

Difference Between Buyer Persona and Target 

It is common that many people tend to confuse these terms; however, although at first glance it seems that they are the same, there is a difference, and I can assure you that both are needed to work perfectly.

target

It is a sociodemographic segmentation of a profile, that is, it involves different aspects such as: age, sex, geographic location, income level, marital status, etc. As you will have seen, this information is very important to gradually reduce or rather define a market that is compatible with our products or services.

It is logical to think that the more defined the target is, the better results we will obtain with our strategies. This is how it has worked for a long time; however, at present, we know that everything evolves, and of course, the way to reach the consumer is no exception.

buyer persona

The difference with the target is that the Buyer Persona is a more specific segmentation , but above all human , since in addition to knowing their demographic aspects, it helps us understand all their needs and better still, solve them through our products or services.

The Buyer Persona is nothing more than a target (a sociodemographic definition of a profile) accompanied by a "Pain" or "pain point", which in marketing refers to all those motivations, needs and concerns that the consumer wants to solve.

As you will have seen, the target is still a fundamental piece in the construction of a Buyer Persona , but once you identify their behaviors and behaviors, you have a great advantage over your competition.

 

Importance of the Buyer Persona

The Buyer Persona will help you better understand your current and potential customers , from how you have to communicate with them, how to understand their behaviors, what types of products or services to offer them according to their motivations, needs, etc.

Within the Buyer Persona you can also review the Customer Journey.

It will also become the guiding axis of all your marketing campaigns, in fact, the success or failure will depend on it, speaking in terms of sales or the degree of affinity that the public adopts with your brand.

Customer Journey and Buyer Persona

Once you have your Buyer Persona clear and defined , it is important to know the behavior of your consumer in order to design the correct messages.

For example, if it is in an early phase of interest, impress it with exciting content, if it is in a research phase, create product sheets that resolve its doubts or if it is in a decision phase, support it with additional content.

Regarding the action phase, we must take control of the process and carry out the necessary actions so that the client, who has already evaluated different options in the market, is convinced that our product is the best option. Small details are what make the difference (discount codes, direct attention, personalized messages, etc.)

What are the types of Buyer Personas?

As mentioned in previous lines, each company must define its ideal buyer according to the values ​​and needs that it has, however, it is possible to classify Buyer Personas into 4 types:

Decider : He is the one who has the final decision on the purchase or acquisition of a product or service.

Prescriber : He is the one who advises the decision-maker to acquire a product or service. He has a great capacity for convincing.

Influencer : It is the person who positively or negatively influences the acquisition of a product. The influencer's opinion is extremely important to those who follow him and companies must be aware of who these characters are.

Negative : Those people who may be interested in your brand, but are not willing to consume it.

Advantages of creating a Buyer Persona

When a brand or a company takes the time to get to know their consumers emotionally, the benefits they can obtain are the following:

• Have a better overview of current and potential customers (leads).
• Create better strategies, better focused and relevant to the target audience.
• Know the design, monitoring or execution defects in the sale of the product or service.
• Know the best way to "reward" customers, thus creating loyalty and motivating word of mouth recommendation.
• Launching a new product or improving an existing one is more successful by knowing what people want.

How to create your Buyer Persona?

Many times it is recommended to create a fictitious representation of how you would like your ideal client to be, the problem is that if you do not control expectations, the results will be 100% unrealistic.

It is better to build your Buyer Persona with specific data , starting by investigating the users who have already bought from you, those who want to buy from you ( leads ) and those who have bought from your competition. I assure you that you will find a series of common patterns.

Here are some ways you can get enough information to create a buyer persona.

Social networks

Here there is a range of possibilities for you to understand their needs, motivations and way of communicating with your future clients.

For example, LinkedIn is one of my favorites since it is similar to a Buyer Persona profile , since it contains demographic data, sometimes hobbies, motivations and challenges, etc.

In other social networks you can understand more about lifestyles and even their aspirations.

Collect the data and build your list

Distribute the information as follows and even ask key questions to help you further understand their possible personality and behavior:

Personal and demographic data

• Name
• Age
• educational level
• marital status
• employment status
• Income

Staff

• What motivates you?
• Who or what inspires you?
• Where do you spend more time? (House work)
• Hobbies?
• fears?
• Lifestyle?
• What do you spend your money on?

online behavior

• Where and how do you look for information?
• What social networks do you use?
• How do you communicate on each social network? (meme, emoji, hashtag)
• What devices do you use?
• Do you use shopping platforms?
• What payment system do you use?
• What brands do you follow?
• What kind of content do you enjoy? (Blog, podcast, vlog, etc.)
• How much time do you spend on the internet?

Labor data

• What area is it in?
• What is your position in the company?
• What are your professional aspirations?
• Do you have a work problem?

This is one of the many ways you can use to build your Buyer Persona . Remember that this is a fictitious representation, but with very real data. If you want more information on this topic or you are looking for other options to profile your ideal client, at MHA you will find the solution you need.