Author: Johana Duque
Edition: Santiago Robledo
Translation: Juan Pablo Martínez
The Buyer Persona is an essential tool of digital marketing and defines, in large part, the success of your online activity, since you can show which is your target group towards which your company is directed, specifically, in the creation of content (blogs, social media).
To establish a Buyer Persona or several, it is necessary to ask some questions to use the collected information productively and make decisions in favour of that profile, in order to correctly direct such actions.
You cannot lose focus, since the creation of content is a fundamental part to awaken the interest of your potential customers that will provide your business with tangible and concrete results that provide greater reliability to the niche in which you work.
Today in Seiren Digital you will learn why it is essential to have this figure, not only for the product development but also for the production and creation of topics aimed at attracting new customers/leads (potential customers).
What is a Buyer Persona?
Its representation is fictitious, but it is based on real data that represents the behaviour of a customer with demographic characteristics, personal histories, goals, motivations and even concerns.
These are the most common ones and allow you to have a first approach to identify your potential consumers. So, once you have the database through the conversion funnel, as part of the implementation of inbound marketing, it will be easier to start with the research.
Remember that each profile is different since they are the representation of individuals or consumers of your product/service. To define a profile with greater coverage and breadth, in the case of segmentation, we recommend focusing on satisfied and dissatisfied customers.
Remember that each creation has something to teach you so that you know what points are working and what are the challenges versus those that are not. It is important that you can differentiate the Target Group from the Buyer Persona because they are not the same definition.
Buyer Persona and Target Group together but not mixed up.
The Target Group are those people who are grouped because they are formed under certain characteristics, defined by age, gender, economic level, and among other information that allows segmenting and developing content around the detected and collected values.
This means that once identified, you will know-how and with what specific words to say to approach each one of them, as these conditions allow you to recognize tone and language, to attract and convince.
For example, it is not the same for you to approach a man as it is for a woman, due to behavioural issues and typical tastes of their gender. Nor is it the same to approach to an older man, 70 years old, as it is to an 18-year-old teenager.
Let’s look at a more structured Target Group profile:
- Women, housewives, with no income, who want to start their own home-based business through handicrafts.
Now, we will see what the difference with a Buyer Persona is:
- Alejandra is 16 years old and has just graduated from school. She has not yet decided what she wants to study. She likes to read and write. She lives with her parents, who support her financially. She is stratum 3, with own house in Bogotá.
The difference is more than obvious; the Target Group embraces broader values. The Buyer Persona, on the other hand, emphasized the human being, with common characteristics and traits.
The Target Group is who you sell a product or service to, and the Buyer Persona is just a representation of this customer.
The importance of a Buyer Persona in the business.
The creation of a Buyer Persona is nothing more than the right way to send the right message to the right person and not die trying, to have more chances for the chosen strategy to work and succeed within the company.
Even when it is not defined, the intention of trying to reach a segment in the wrong way will end up alienating the real targets.
- Example : If your company promotes a liquor brand, you are not going to talk to minors.
In general terms, the Buyer Persona will prevent you from making several mistakes that can cost reputation, money and credibility.
Building a Buyer Persona
In order to determinate the contents with which you will achieve your goals, you must:
- Define the tone and style of the topics.Determinar el contenido ideal
- Determine the ideal content.
- Focus on the Target Group.
- Identify potential customers.
In the construction you will have to analyze questions such as the following:
- Who is my potential customer?
- What are the most common activities of my potential customer?
- What information does he/she consume?
- What are the media where he/she accesses information?
- What are the topics of their interest?
- What may be their biggest challenges?
- What may be their biggest obstacles?
Remember to always go further, do not settle for simple answers, because your competitors already know those answers and will go in the same way. You must convert data into potential customers/consumers.
Once you have all the material (collected from the surveys), you should consolidate the information and propose a profile for an evaluation by several members of the company, in order to take advantage of opinions that, although divided, can provide extraordinary results.
Characteristics of a Buyer Persona
It must be as humanized and personalized as possible, therefore, it must have the following features:
- Name (Fictitious).
- Gender
- Age
- Ocupation
- Market/niche to which the company belongs.
- Educational level.
- Objectives and challenges.
- Image / graphic model.
Once you have it defined, humanize it and ask yourself, if it were a visitor to your business, What would he/she look for inside it? At what level of the funnel would he/she enter? How to approach it? How to explain what your company does? Is he/she looking for something specific or does he/she just want to see what you offer?
The ideal model of a Buyer Person
Although there is no ideal model, precisely because you must avoid falling into stereotypes and unreal profiles, it will be very important that you consider the following steps:
- Research: Use the internet, because it is one of the easiest and most comfortable places to do such research but go a little further. Interview real people: make surveys, calls, send emails or forms.
- Don’t judge: Do not fall into judgmental towards your customers. Your content can be of great empathy as unpleasant, if you use, unintentionally, something that may be offensive to any population or condition in general, by the country of origin, race, sexual preferences, among others.
E.g.: “The drink of the true males”. You are automatically in favour of sexism, so a good number of women could stop following your content. And even more, when it is such a sensitive issue these days.
- Everything has its moment: You can be “trendy” or go according to the trend, in order to preserve campaigns and give them the necessary relevance/diffusion, but do not “hang” yourself on difficult situations or just a moment to reach your customers, because it can be labelled as opportunism.
E.g.: There was an earthquake and you take advantage of the topic to sponsor some promotion in your business: “Prices that will make you tremble” – Sounds illogical, burlesque and instead of producing empathy, it will generate the opposite.
- Update yourself: Go beyond, become the Buyer Persona you are proposing; pay attention to the news, consult truthful and verifiable information in reports, statistics, company studies and reliable sources.
¡First of all, be realistic!
Conclusions
In order to have successful products and campaigns that leave excellent revenues in their wake, it is necessary to carry out the research process, avoiding the “assumptions”.
Always consider that the Buyer Persona may be a visitor who has just arrived, who knows nothing about your company, does not even know what he/she wants or simply come to you looking for a solution to a problem.
Here at Seiren we can help and advise you on building your entire digital strategy, starting with the Buyer Persona so that your business has a defined strategy and objectives.
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