What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is created by businesses to define their ideal customer. It’s a detailed description of a potential buyer based on deep research.
A buyer persona is quite different from a user persona. While both are essential to any marketing strategy, the buyer persona is often tailored towards the individuals who purchase the product or service. As for user persona, it’s more focused on the end-user. To illustrate, a manager may buy a task management tool for his workers. Although he is the buyer, the workers are the end-users.
Sometimes the user can also be the buyer; hence, businesses create a buyer and user persona. You can’t know every buyer, but you can create a buyer persona to help categorize them. Since different people buy products for various reasons, creating numerous buyer personas is essential. It helps to put buyers with similar personalities in the same category. Each category of buyers will be based on demographics, traits, interests, and more. These details help businesses understand the needs and buying patterns of potential buyers.
Importance of Buyer Persona
Buyer Persona offers several benefits to a business. For one, it helps a company prioritize the needs of buyers. A social media marketing campaign will be designed with buyers in mind — making it practical and targeted.
When a business uses paid advertisement, a buyer persona will help it reach the target audience. It will get the ad in front of the right people.
Additionally, it helps businesses look for ways to look for organic methods of appealing to their audience creatively. And over time, a relationship can be forged.
Risk Associated with Buyer Persona
A buyer persona is semi-fictional — because it is just an assumption based on data since representatives of the business didn’t interview each potential buyer. Due to this, there’s always a chance that the deduction may be incorrect. Other risks are:
Focuses on Selling Than Satisfying Customers
The focus of most businesses is to sell. Hence, when creating a buyer persona, the goal is to appeal to potential buyers. The effort is channeled towards making the most of the marketing strategy. It doesn’t factor in the needs of customers. So, potential customers may not buy a product if it doesn’t meet their core needs.
It Becomes Outdated Quickly
Due to the nature of the business world, trends change a lot. As a result, a buyer persona may become outdated quickly. The assumed interests of potential buyers may change, and the tool product or service is in trend.
How to Create a Buyer Persona
The following are essential steps in creating a buyer persona:
● Audience Research: Audience research involves getting details like age, sex, interest, level of education, and profession. Tools like Google Analytics, Hootsuite, and many more are helpful.
● Know the needs of a potential Buyer.
● Know what your target audience needs. It will include goals, problems they intend to solve, and barriers hindering their plans.
● Sectionalize your audience and categorize the buyer persona.
● Define a name and create a story for the Buyer Persona.
● Use the persona to develop a suitable marketing campaign.
