Creating a marketing strategy tailored to business objectives is essential for a brand. Throughout this process, companies spend a great deal of effort, time and dedication on developing a plan to reach their target consumer. For this reason, it’s important to understand potential users, since their tastes and preferences will guide the strategies and tools that will allow them to be reached.
In this task, the figure of the buyer persona can be key. Do you know what we mean by this term? It is the fictitious representation of an ideal customer, used to better understand the needs, behaviors, objectives and challenges of a company’s real or potential customers. During the process of creating this archetype, research is also conducted into, among other things, demographics and motivations, through interviews, surveys, data analysis and similar methods.
Differences between target and buyer persona
Once we have defined the concept of buyer persona, do they seem similar to target or target audience? This is logical, since in marketing it is very common to use this term.
The main difference between the two is that the concept of target audience is much more abstract, since it aims to group together a group of individuals without their own entity. An example of a target audience is: a group of men and women between the ages of 25 and 35, with higher education and an average monthly income of 1,800 euros. On the other hand, the buyer persona is: Juan, 26 years old and graduated in Business Administration and Management. His interests include traveling and in the short-medium term he intends to broaden his knowledge by studying a master’s degree abroad.
If you make the mistake of defining only the target, it is likely that you are missing certain characteristics of individuals that may be of interest to you. In addition, it is most common that within the target audience there are several different buyer personas. That said, if these archetypes are defined correctly, a brand is able to create more specific and ultimately more effective marketing campaigns.
How to create a buyer persona
Creating a buyer persona is not too complicated, although it is true that it requires a lot of time and a thorough analysis of the environment. We can summarize this process in four steps:
- Define needs: this involves thinking about what aspects of the user can be useful when developing a strategy. This can include demographics, employment status, challenges and concerns, behaviors, etc.
- Collect customer information: any source can be useful, from databases to external ones, such as LinkedIn or other social networks where your customers are active.
- Delimit the data: once you have collected all the information, it is time to choose the one that answers the questions posed in the first point. In this step it is very important to take into account the strengths and weaknesses of your brand, which will be reflected in the definition of your strategy.
- Build the buyer persona: the characteristics of this consumer archetype or ideal customer must be clearly represented, so that it can be identified by any member of the team.
If after developing the buyer persona profile you think you have segmented too deeply, you will be interested to know that it is quite common for brands to have more than one consumer archetype. However, you must do this in a conscious and deliberate way, as creating too many buyer personas can cause your strategy to lose its focus.
In short, creating a buyer persona can help companies better understand their customers and develop more effective marketing strategies to reach them, so it can be a very useful tool especially if you need to redefine a marketing strategy or even a product. If you found this article useful, we invite you to check out the rest of our blog posts and, of course, don’t forget to follow us on our social networks.