Think like your customer. Use Buyer Personas to boost your digital marketing strategy

Why is it necessary to know the Target Audience that will use our Products and Services? Why are socio-demographic variables not enough? And why are we increasingly talking about Buyer Persona in B2C and B2B?

As companies, we learn more about our typical customers to understand how to market and sell our products or services. However, in the age of Digital Marketing, we can no longer rely solely on socio-demographic variables-as was the case in the past, to define the Target Audience.

Digital Marketing has given us possibilities for a more in-depth analysis of the target audience that goes by Buyer Persona, which we will analyze in this article.

Buyer Personas: Meaning and Role in Digital Marketing

Personae are important in digital marketing because they help companies deepen their target audience and highlight their manifest and latent needs. By deeply understanding their target audience, companies can design strategies that resonate with the Target audience and generate conversions.

Personae help companies create content targeted to their audiences, bringing them more attention, interest, desire and action in conversions and sales. In addition, Personas – when adequately designed – help companies increase performance and quality by ensuring that they are not wasting resources on ineffective marketing strategies.

Digital marketing has given the target audience many more tools to refine their product (b2c) or service (b2b) experience. All this allows us to go into the details of our typical client’s reasoning and see the world with his worldview (Weltanschauung).

That is why Personae are a fundamental and indispensable component of digital marketing.

What are buyer personas?

A Buyer Persona is a representation of your ideal customer based on demographic and psychographic variables:

• Demographic data: age, gender, position, job title, etc.
• Psychographic data: Identity and Interests, Habits, Behaviors, Places Attended, Buying Habits.
• Goals: what does the buyer want to achieve?
• Challenges: what challenges does the buyer face?

The goal is to get a profile of our target prospect as close as possible to the actual customer.

We should use digital data to define a Persona: Digital & Social Media Listening and Digital & Social Media Monitoring applications; CRM and other data-driven applications allow us to define Personas anonymously:

• effectively limiting the inevitable cognitive biases (prejudices) of those who draw them .
• enabling continuous updating

Persona comes from the Latin Persona -ae and is translated as “mask, character, figure, person, condition, status, authority.” The Englishification of the term has determined that it is accepted in the plural as Personas.

Are Brand Persona, buyer Persona or eCommerce Persona the same thing?

As the marketing manager of an e-commerce company, you may be wondering whether you should create a brand persona or an e-commerce buyer persona.

The term Persona is a hat term susceptible to different declensions: The answer to the previous question is, therefore, a free consequence of your purposes:

• When you want to create a strong and recognizable brand, you will need to focus on creating a brand persona.
• When your main goal is to increase sales and conversions, you will create a Buyer Persona that you can, as needed, polarize to a specific channel:
  • When you sell exclusively on your Web site, you will need to create aneCommerce Buyer Persona, which is a Persona explicitly based on the eCommerce channel.
  • When you sell exclusively at the point of sale, then you will create a Customer Persona

How to make a buyer persona?

Creating a Buyer Persona may seem daunting, but it is essential for any company that wants to create targeted content and strategies.

To begin, you will need to collect data about your target audience. This can be done through surveys, interviews, and customer research. Once you have this data, you will need to analyze it and distil it into the key characteristics of your ideal buyer. Creating a Buyer Persona includes demographics, needs, motivations and objections.

With this information in hand, you can start creating your buyer persona. Assign them a name and a face, and fill in the rest of their profile with the information you have collected.

Once you have created your buyer persona, use it as a guide to determine the impacts of your marketing actions.

Buyer persona: examples

Below I provide two summary examples of Buyer Personas, one for B2C and the other for B2B.

• Buyer Persona 1- Anna: young professional, aged 25-34, looking to purchase her first home with her partner(s). They are employed full-time and have a moderate income.
• Buyer Persona 2 – Julia: marketing manager in a small to a medium-sized technology company. She has a team of 2 people under her, and is responsible for managing all marketing initiatives of the company

What is the most insidious mistake in designing a Buyer Persona?

In my counselling profession, I often find that the most insidious mistake is forgetting to analyze the person’s needs deeply. These mistakes can lead to marketing and sales messages that miss the mark because they lose sight of the persona’s genuine need and ultimately result in slogans that are as repetitive as they are anaesthetizing.

To avoid this, take the time to understand what your target buyer wants and has a manifest and/or latent need. What are their weaknesses? What are their goals? What motivates them? Once you clearly understand these things, you can create messages and offers that speak directly to them and ultimately lead to more sales.

Without having understood and integrated their needs into your persona, i.e. what brings her or should bring her to you, this leads in a chain to a debasement of the Customer Journey

Most companies understand the importance of target markets and buyer personas. What happens when you have not understood or integrated the needs of your target market into your persona? This can be a recipe for disaster.

Your target market is the foundation of your business success.

Without a clear understanding of who they are, what they need, and what motivates them, it will be challenging to create products or services they will want to purchase. And without a buyer persona, you will have difficulty marketing effectively to them.

Creating a Buyer Persona is not just about collecting data. It involves understanding the emotional needs and motivations of the target market. What are their weaknesses? What are their goals? What do they fear? Answering these questions will help you create a persona that is recognizable and easy to market.

As companies, we must design personas to understand that buyers move through stages as they make a purchasing decision.

The first stage is awareness, in which the buyer becomes aware of a problem or need. The second stage is consideration, in which the buyer researches potential solutions. The third stage is the decision, in which the buyer chooses a product or service.

Many companies make the mistake of designing their persona without considering the different stages of the buyer’s journey. As a result, they end up with people who are too general and do not provide sufficient guidance on how to market and sell to specific types of buyers.