The buyer persona corresponds to a fictitious prototype of the target of the company’s buyers. Based on statistical data, the profile will give an overview of potential customers’ needs and desires and their characteristics and requirements. Therefore, buyer personas are a useful marketing tool, which is more generally part of personas.
What are buyer personas?
Buyer personas are fictitious representative profiles of potential customers. We also speak more simply in French of “typical buyer.” These people, defined by way of example, represent the target group of a company. Although these profiles are fictitious, the background information is based on real data and measurable socio-demographic facts, such as purchasing behavior, habits, or centers of interest.
In online marketing, typical buyers are at the center of conceptual and strategic planning. Buyer personas are an effective way to keep an eye on who you’re talking to. It is also an opportunity to understand customers better and know which marketing measures are the most effective.
Create a typical buyer profile
The strategic implementation of buyer personas is only useful if we can draw up a very detailed profile. Upstream, it is, therefore, essential to define your target group based on empirical data. You will be able to obtain them thanks to detailed web analysis and tracking processes. Socio-economic and demographic data also play an essential role in determining precise profiles.
Social media also offer critical features of the target. Many users have publicly available profiles. These give a good idea of the interests and lifestyles of the different buyers.
Here is some essential information to know about your target group:
- Age
- Sex
- Civil status
- Place of residence
- Level of education
- Socio-Professional Category
- Income
In general, several personas are created for each target group. The average is two to four, but it can also be useful to create many more with a huge target. The number of buyer personas depends on the complexity of the product or the scope of your product range.
To start, you have to look at the data you have about real people. Besides the general gathering of information on the target, it is also essential to have personal contact with representative people. You can interview existing customers, launch opinion polls, or rely on market research reports. Based on the knowledge thus acquired and the data resulting from the analyzes, detailed profiles as realistic as possible will be established. A description of a buyer personas may contain the following:
- Demographic data
- Interests and hobbies
- Preferences
- Habits, especially consumer habits
- Needs
- Expectations of the product, service, or company
- Buying behavior
- Search history
A kind of curriculum vitae can thus be created. It is good to favor a narrative form rather than to make a sober enumeration of critical points. Indeed, it is the emotions that it is important to highlight also in this process. If you can, add photos that make sense for the profile. Quotes gathered from interviews with customers also make the profiles even more concrete. To create a buyer persona, you can also use tools. With the help of this free program, it is possible to develop a sort of card gathering the most crucial information for each persona.
The advantages of buyer personas
If it is well created, the buyer persona allows a faster and more precise vision of its target than with a simple data collection. Potential buyers are not a uniform group in which each individual corresponds to the average. These are individuals who share only specific characteristics. Thus, the buyer persona makes it possible to get closer to its buyers, even if they are merely fictitious prototypes.
Not all customers see the same benefits in a product, do not make the same associations of ideas, and do not experience the same sensations. Therefore, the path to get to the product can be very different from one customer to another. From an initial interest in the product to the actual purchase decision, a person’s journey is not the same for everyone. Buyer personas strive to reflect this diversity as much as possible.
This has a substantial impact on marketing. If you know the different interests, values , and motivations of potential customers, you can adapt your advertising measures accordingly. Instead of a standard solution that would be a little suitable for everyone but would not correspond to anyone, you can use more precise profiles. In this way, by reaching more deeply to potential customers, it is easier to succeed in its marketing campaign.
Also, working with buyer personas increases customer interest. Marketers not only work with raw numbers but also work on profiles using their creativity. When working on buyer personas, we focus on the different types of personalities within the target group. This often promotes new impulses.
Once the final profile is created, you have a clear document. As this new profile has a fictitious image and name, we can proceed with a more personal treatment. We are talking to a specific person (although imagined) and not to an unknown mass of buyers. As a result, coordinated marketing efforts are generally more lively and attractive.
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