Updated on 20/02/2023
Buyer person: an Introduction
In an ever-changing and increasingly digital world, a one-size-fits-all approach no longer works. The growth of your business depends on your ability to effectively target the right audiences for your products and services. This involves creating detailed profiles, also known as Buyer Personas. However, it’s easy to get caught up in the profiling and forget that behind every Buyer Persona there is an actual person/ customer that you’re targeting. Doxee Pvideo® will help you take personalization to the next level.
What is a Buyer Persona?
The concept was introduced by Alan Cooper, an American software designer and programmer, in his book “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum.” He used the term to develop user-friendly software.
Wikipedia defines a Buyer Persona as “A term used in marketing to identify and understand the typical customer in his personal characteristics, as well as socio-demographic. In fact, it is a fictitious character outlined in its behavioural peculiarities and that reveals the buying insights, bringing out what they think and what potential customers do when they look for a solution to their problem or need. ”
Defining a Buyer Persona requires creating a very detailed customer profile based on variables such as hobbies, shopping habits, interests and more.
Why are Buyer Personas important?
In business, it’s important to know as much as possible about your target audience, the businesses and people who will ideally be buying your products or services. Within this group, the audiences and the way they use your product or service and how they apply it will likely be very different. Which means that in order to speak to those customers, a one-size-fits-all approach wouldn’t be effective. Instead, each action should be targeted down to the segment of buyers that share similar characteristics. Buyer personas take that segmentation even further to allow you to target your communications with precision.
One thing to clarify up front is that a buyer persona is not the same thing as a target audience. Your target audience is the people who will benefit from your product or service and who are most likely to buy it. Defining a target audience would require information like demographics, gender, and age. However, when a company defines a Buyer Persona, it takes much more detailed information into account to build a multi-dimensional profile beyond. Age, gender, and geographic location.
For example, Buyer Personas should contain:
- Demographic information, such as age, gender, and geographic location
- Psychographic information, such as interests, hobbies, and aspirations
In conclusion, if someone asks what is a Buyer Persona, we can affirm that it is an evolution of the concept of a target audience.
Not by chance, Buyer Personas are the central point of the inbound marketing approach. Inbound marketing is a methodology that was first named in the book “Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs” by the founders of Hubspot. Inbound marketing is an evolution of traditional marketing, which has the goal of delivering one-directional messages. Instead, inbound marketing focuses on making sure that your business can be found by potential clients. From Hubspot: “Inbound is a method of attracting, engaging, and delighting people to grow a business that provides value and builds trust.”
Using Buyer Personas, businesses can create a strategy to attract customers and this might include the creation of blog posts, social media campaigns and webinars that those personas would find of value for their business or goals. This also includes the website. Targeting your website to specific buyer personas made those sites 2 to 5 times easier to use by those target audiences (source: Hubspot). This means that your website should have content of interest and value targeted to those buyer personas. According to a Spotlight report about content marketing, identifying Buyer Personas increases the relevance of content by 58%.
What is a Buyer Persona? The definition process
To define your Buyer Persona will require an analytic approach that includes a careful study of market information, historical company data, social media reports, web analytics, interview data and a discussion with sales. In addition, your CRM can be a good source of information about customer preferences, habits and behaviors.
Hubspot has created a very useful tool: Make My Persona. It is a free tool for creating a profile using a specific question, which is suggested from the tool. Otherwise, companies can use templates to keep track of information that will be useful for identifying and further defining your Buyer Personas, resulting in detailed profiles according to interests, habits, everyday challenges, online behavior, social usage, shopping and communication preferences.
Here is an example of a Buyer Persona profile for a company that develops mobile apps:
“Andy is eager to learn about politics so he can advance his efforts. Creating relevant downloadable e-books and guides are a great way to provide Andy something valuable while capturing his information for lead nurturing. Additionally, Andy is a smartphone user and enjoys app games. Mobile advertising or SMS alerts could prove very successful. Gamification of the app with task completion rewards could also appeal to his gamer side, enticing him to download the app and even become a promoter of the app through social sharing of his earned rewards.”
However, as Autumn Sullivan reports in an article, Buyer Personas are the beginning of a long journey. At the end of the day, behind percentages, Excel files and seemingly impersonal documents are actual people, living and breathing customers.
People are important for every marketing strategy
It is important to remember that we need to create a strong relationship with customers, and that starts by meeting a need. Buyer Persona is the beginning of a new trip: loyalty.
People choose products and services from companies they know and trust. And the best way to build trust is to show genuine understanding and concern for the other person. Trust implies a change in communication and in the way the company presents itself.
In Doxee we do that with personalized videos. Doxee Pvideo® is the platform of interactive and personalized video that allows you to incorporate features that are unique to your customers right in the video, creating an experience that is engaging and memorable.
With personalization, you’re not just targeting a market segment or a Buyer Persona, you’re talking directly to a person: your customer.