Buyer Persona – Short Conceptual Explanation

A buyer persona is a person who is invented by a marketing department to represent a member of the company’s target audience. When creating this fictitious persona, it’s important to consider things like behavior patterns, demographics, motivations, and more. The more detailed the persona and the fewer personas being considered, the more effective this strategy is at predicting customer behaviors. Based on these predictions, marketing strategies can be developed to better target the audience that the persona represents.

Creating an effective buyer persona

Creating a buyer persona is a great way to ensure products, services, and marketing strategies are resonating with the right audience, but the detail, accuracy, and quality of each persona is important.

Creating an effective persona includes considering the specific background of the buyers, how old they are, their life goals, who they socialize with, what problems they face on a daily basis, and anything else that sheds light on their daily experience. Make sure that the information is based on factual data to avoid creating a persona that doesn’t represent an actual audience.

Larger businesses may have multiple personas, but in general, less is better. The more concrete and focused the target audience, the more a company is able to cater to that audience.

Creating negative buyer personas can also be an effective way to understand ideal customers better. This strategy involves creating a persona for a customer the company doesn’t want to cater to. It might include demographics that have no use for the product, customers that are too expensive to acquire, or students who engage with blog content but have no intention to buy.

Types of buyer personas

There are no general buyer personas that work across industries and companies. Instead, a persona is extremely personal to each company that creates it. Although the type of persona may be identified at the beginning of the process, the details of the persona that is being created are often uncovered as the process unfolds.

However, there are some examples that are fairly common that can help get businesses started when everyone feels a little stuck. They include the stay-at-home-mom, the busy college student, and the career-driven bachelor.

To get a better overall picture of a buyer persona, consider using an online tool. It can make creating a general persona quick and easy, but it can also provide marketing teams with inspiration that enables them to dive deeper into the persona’s goals, motivations, and frustrations.

How a buyer persona can be used in marketing

Buyer personas can be used to understand target customers better, which then can inform a company’s marketing strategy.

Personas are a great way to create personalized marketing strategies. Instead of sending out a single email newsletter to all customers, creating a buyer persona enables companies to cater messages to subsections of their audience. Personas make it easier to map out the sales cycle, creating targeted content for each stage depending on the type of customer being considered, and they can ensure blog content, videos, and other types of content are on-message.

A negative buyer persona can inform a marketing strategy as well. Low- or no-value contacts can be removed from email lists and advertising channels to help the company achieve a lower cost-per customer.