What is a Buyer Persona and Why Does Your Business Need One?

Mar 16, 2021

As the digital world becomes increasingly saturated with marketing content, it has never been more important to engage in targeted promotions. Adapting your marketing strategy to suit a target audience will ensure your core brand message gets through to the people willing to listen, rather than drowning in a sea of noise.

So, how should you go about identifying the needs of your target audience? Fleshing out a few realistic buyer persona is a good place to start.

What is a buyer persona, and how do they benefit businesses?

What is a customer, or buyer persona, and how do they benefit businesses? Simply put, a customer, buyer, marketing, or user persona is a profile describing a company’s imaginary ideal customer. Buyer personas are grounded in research and designed to help marketers understand the needs and everyday challenges faced by the types of customers they want to reach. Using this knowledge, marketers can then go about writing and creating content that their core customer base finds genuinely useful and compelling, thereby driving engagement, optimising marketing resources, and boosting profits.

It is relatively common for a business to design multiple marketing personas, particularly if their goods and services are wide-ranging. Different types of customers have different ways of evaluating products, after all, so marketing professionals may need to employ several strategies to meet a diverse range of expectations.

There is no comprehensive set of buyer persona examples, as every business serves a unique set of customers. However, there are several broad ways that customers can be grouped, including by:

Age

Under which generation(s) do most of your customers fall? Members of Generation Z live very different lives to Baby Boomers, after all.

Location

In which time zones do your key customers live? If you have customer all over the world, remember to send your marketing emails in targeted batches.

Income

How much money is your audience willing to spend? Are you trying to sell luxury or affordability?

Language

Try not to assume that all of your customers speak English. Do you have the resources to release marketing materials in different languages?

Interests

Gather and analyse data about your audience’s hobbies and habits. Are they regular TV watchers, eco-warriors, fashionistas, wine connoisseurs, or bookworms? Understanding these kinds of details could help you to build a marketing strategy that truly resonates.

Life stage

Are your customers university students, new parents, or retired adults? People in different life stages tend to face unique challenges and concerns.

Here is a customer profile example that may prove helpful if you were coming up with content marketing strategies for, say, a trendy new coffee outlet:

BUYER PERSONA

Name: Candice

Age: 25

Location: London

Finances: £20,000-£35,000 per year

Influenced by: Friends, inspiring women, and social media trends

Hobbies: Writing short stories, baking, and running

What she’s looking for: Somewhere to relax and unwind after a

day in the office

Although this example is brief, it could help a marketer design a strong brand identity that appeals to a young, sociable woman. Of course, this type of persona is unlikely to help a B2B business. If your clients are other companies, you will need to consider factors such as the size of the target organisation and the types of people likely to be the CEO or decision-maker. If you run an e-commerce site, you may also wish to come up with buyer personas based on user habits. Among them could include:

Cart abandoners

This user persona is very common (and frustrating!) You will need to consider how to convert them using breath-taking content marketing strategies and email campaigns.

First-time buyers

This is a precious customer persona you will need to nurture with special offers and impeccable customer service.

Bouncers

Bouncers tend to be impatient and unwilling to wait for sites to load or fill out lengthy forms. They can potentially be won over by improving your website’s user experience.

Passive browsers

These users tend to browse sites without making purchases. Marketers will need to consider how they can be encouraged to part with their money.

Impulse buyers

Perfect candidates for upselling!

How to define your perfect marketing personas using AI

If your business is fairly new, it is possible to come up with a few reasonable buyer personas based on the unique selling points of your goods and services. If you’re promoting kids’ clothing, for example, it’s fairly obvious that your key customer persona is a parent. However, to truly understand your audience and their motivations, there are several AI analytics tools out there to help refine your marketing strategy.

Such tools work by harnessing anonymised data from sites such as Google Analytics and using it to come up with detailed user personas. Most are capable of honing the marketing personas using industry-specific insights and segmenting the abstract personas according to factors such as purchasing behaviour.

Investing in this kind of technology could save your marketing team a huge amount of time and effort. What’s more, it will constantly update your buyer personas in line with changing consumer demands and market conditions.

How many target personas should you have?

Although the purpose of a customer persona is to narrow a business’s marketing focus, you may require two or three to fully account for your entire demographic base. You may, for example, need several product lines that speak to the demands of vastly different age groups, professions, or hobbyists.

Coming up with distinct and separate buyer personas to suit their different needs will help you hone your marketing techniques. It is worth noting, however, that creating too many buyer personas could make your brand strategy seem confused and incoherent.

Start understanding your ideal customer today!

As we’ve mentioned before, understanding your target audience via buyer personas is a fundamental part of any effective marketing strategy.

If you need help building AI-informed content marketing strategies that resonate with your core base of customers, Allsopp Media is here to help. Book your free 30 minutes no obligation call with us today to find out more and get started.