I want to promote myself, even sell products and services. But do I know who? Do I have all the details about my ideal client? For this, you must definitely define the consumer, or Buyer Persona. Let’s find out together from this article what are the steps taken to achieve a profile of consumer, shopper or customer.
What is a Buyer Persona?
Represents the structured profile of a typical consumer that includes socio-geo-demographic data, but also information about his behavior, attitudes and preferences in terms of consumption and brands, as well as characteristics relevant to his lifestyle.
What elements build the buyer persona?
A consumer profile is built with the help of an analysis of the target market, the real date, taken in several ways by potential customers. It can be of two types: Business to Consumer and Business to Business.
If in B2C person (business to consumer persona) we also include details about work, in B2B (business to business) we will also detail the role in the company for the care of the works and the current responsibility.
If you work in eCommerce, a well-structured Buyer Persona can bring you many benefits in the company, I help you to be changed so much by the design in the online store, platform, website, and structure. You will know how to address your target audience because we have come to know them.
The elements needed to create a buyer are:
- socio-geo-demographic date;
- attitudes and preferences regarding the brand and category of products or services;
- lifestyle;
- professional history (for B2B);
- procurement challenges or barriers;
- sources of information.
Obviously, each profile is made uniquely and differently depending on industry, country, market, stage of life in the company. It’s like you manage to get into the mind of your consumer, to know what worries him, how much time I have available for your brand and when it’s the right time to talk to him/her.
Benefits of defining a consumer profile
A well-made consumer profile will simplify the work of people in the marketing department (content, product, message, design, launch, etc.).
In a case study developed by NetProspex, the impact of some buyer persons for the company was analyzed in detail. First of all, they conducted several interviews and consumer profiles.
As a result, the content on the website is now addressed to each type of person identified. The results saw a 46% increase in conversions, a 100% increase in the number of pages visited, a 900% increase in visits, a 171% higher marketing revenue and a 111% increase in email open rates.
Why it is important to define this buyer persona
Contrary to the usual way of working in marketing segmentation, there are more types of consumers than we think. For example, there is a large group of customers who like to check the product in physical stores first and then go online.
For each group, you need to find out what their needs, consumption characteristics or interests are? If you outline a buyer persona you have the chance to reach all these points.
Moreover, by defining these personae in detail you will create more effective shopper marketing activations, more effective client briefs for pitches and inspiring creative briefs.
The gold standard in customer segmentation created by Tesco in the UK
In 1995, the British retailer Tesco managed by segmenting the database to create over 8000 customer profiles that materialized in 8000 segments for CRM.
Each of these segments received a dedicated brochure through classic mail, and if a customer, for example, ticked that he was a vegetarian, he never received meat offers in the brochures addressed to him.
How many personas do I need to define?
If you are responsible for a booming brand you definitely need several types of personas, maybe even 20. If you have a start-up, you can start with 2.
These buyer personas help you segment the database, know-how and when to address them. You end up not sending the same emails or ads to everyone, but they will be personalized.
Negative persona
As we want to target what interests us, such as focusing on who we would not want to attract. Do you want competition on the list? Not. Do you want minors when you address adults? Of course not.
Then start creating profiles of negative persona, excluded people. You can include people who are too advanced for your product or service, people for whom you have to pay a lot to attract them. Instead of sending the same message to the entire database, it’s more efficient to segment it and eliminate people you don’t want to interact with. It’s the right way to optimize cost per lead and cost per customer and increase sales.
What marketing tools can you use to gather customer persona data?
From my point of view, you can use any solid tool, from big data to questionnaires, interviews, webshop transaction history or Google Analytics cohort analysis.
Moreover, my recommendation is to gather as much data as possible and blend them in the same Excel file, trying to correlate quantitative data from different sources.
This way your final persona profile will be much more solid, backed by multiple data sources.
Practical methods to create a buyer persona:
- Feedback from the sales team, those who interact with the leads brought by digital marketing.
- Find common ground in how leads find and use the content you offer.
- Interview customers and prospects to observe product/service preferences and ideas for improvement.
- Use website forms, groups and questionnaires with confidence
What does a buyer persona look like?
After reading how many benefits these potential consumer profiles can bring you, you ask yourself: Where do I start?
Market: bags for women, B2C, brand: Musette
A buyer persona might look like this:
- Sex: Woman
- Age: 30
- Location: Paris, France
- Occupation: Dermatologist
- Motivation: Laura is quite pretentious when it comes to bags. He likes to go to the shops after work, but this happens a maximum of 2 times a month. She is attached to online shopping because it is more relaxing. He got in touch with the store after typing in Google: custom bags and searched for a brand, not to personalize a bag from his personal wardrobe.
- Personal objectives: He wants a handmade bag with Romanian motif inserts. He also wants shoulder bags to give as a gift.
- Challenges: Most websites offer bags made in China or well-known brands with a common design. It is difficult for him to find personalized bags depending on the style, season, material.
Buyer Persona for B2B (business to business)
Let’s take as a case study the segment of marketing managers in SaaS (Software as a Service) companies and build their brand persona:
- Position: Marketing Manager
- Age: 35 years old
- Decision-maker: Yes
- Location: New York, USA
- Industry: IT
- Salary: 80,000 – 125,000 € / year
- Education: Bachelor Degree in Computer Science
- Subordinate: CEO, VP of Marketing
- Personality: Extroverted, intuitive, based on emotion and perceptions.
- Objectives: To obtain qualitative leads to the sales department, in order to increase the company’s database and revenues.
- Fears: Buying software that does not bring ROI.
- Influenced by: Board, CEO, CFO
- Challenges: He needs tools to simplify his work, to increase the conversion rate in the website with the help of the content.
- Our solutions that suit him: Intelligent marketing automation, Journey builder.
Although there are various templates for the buyer persona on the internet, this profile needs to be original, as well as the company’s business strategy. Ultimately, it’s not just about the buyer persona, but about how you use them in promotions, how it makes the rest of the team understand the customer. In turn, the team needs to know how to help, respond, target or work directly with this ideal consumer.
Now it’s your turn to create a buyer persona for your brand. You can start with the man you last sold to.
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