What is a Buyer Persona? The Key Piece for Your Company

What is a Buyer Persona?

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A buyer persona, or archetype, is a virtual projection of what our potential customer would be like in order to tailor our strategy to their needs. To create this virtual prototype of our current or potential customer, it's necessary to gather as much information as possible about that person: their behavior, age, motivations, needs, hobbies, etc.

Once you have all this data, you can start putting yourself in your customer's shoes to understand what excites them, what they feel, and what they need. Empathy is the best ingredient to cook up the recipe that will allow you to grow sustainably long-term, build loyal customers, and most importantly: happy ones.

importantly: Happy.

How do I create my Buyer Persona?

First of all, the most important thing is to identify the real needs of your company in order to build our buyer persona. To create it efficiently, it is necessary to spend time on small details such as: the products that the company currently has, those that are about to be launched, the context of the company, as well as its organization.

Once we have these internal data from our own company, we must follow a path to get to know the inside of the minds of our customers:

1. Information:

This is a very important task, since all the others depend on it and it consists of capturing as much information as possible from our customers. This Big Data can be obtained directly by asking yourself some key questions such as: What does my client say? What are your fears? What exactly do you need? Can I help you?

To answer these questions, we must ask for help from those who are currently our customers to obtain this valuable information that will help us so much to identify patterns that we can then use to build our buyer persona.

There are several ways to achieve them: telephone surveys, focus groups, in-depth interviews and, of course, with the creation of forms.

2. Filtering:

Once you have obtained all the relevant information about your target audience, it's time to put it all together in an orderly manner to begin the Hunt for insights. This stage is crucial because it's where you're going to start putting the pieces of the puzzle together and really getting to know how your customers think and feel.

You have to put on your detective cap and follow the little clues that our clients have been leaving us subconsciously. The ultimate goal is to truly know the weaknesses and strengths of each person in order to try to help them in everything that is in our power. We should be like good friends who listen for later advise and help.

3. Construction:

Here comes the most creative part. It's time to assign a name and an image representative of our buyer persona. This is the starting point for creating a marketing and customer experience strategy to leave those breadcrumbs so that our customers can find us.

Thanks to knowing our audience perfectly, we can adapt to them much better. Our SEO strategy to make it easier to find us on the internet and our product strategy because we know what they need (which may depend on where you are in the buying cycle). On the other hand, We can even adapt the language of communication on social media.

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What types of Buyer Personas are there?

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Among the many types of buyer personas we can create, we'll classify them into 3 main blocks:

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• Prescribers: These are individuals with a certain authority to recommend a product or service to another user. They have strong opinions, and it's highly relevant to have them as allies so we can use them as a loudspeaker to raise awareness of our brand.
• Influencers: Here, there's a risk that these users might speak negatively about our product. However, it could also be an opportunity to improve it if they're right and the product isn't meeting people's expectations. In this way, they affect other people's purchase decisions, for better or worse.
• Recommenders: These are people who simply recommend a product or service to another person but don't have a real capacity to influence others.

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Are Buyer Persona and Target Audience the same thing?

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The short answer is no. The target audience must be considered as a more abstract concept, since they are subjects without their own identity. On the other hand, a buyer persona does have their own identity, since we know their name, profession and needs. This way we can empathize with him much better.

A target encompasses values such as gender, age, purchasing power. Very generic data. On the other hand, when we talk about a buyer persona, the information goes much further. We focus on your needs, on what you feel and what you are worried about.

We could conclude that a target audience is only the skeleton and Buyer Persona is the rest of the musculature, including the most important: The mind.

How does having a Buyer Persona impact your company?

The short answer is no. The target audience should be considered a more abstract concept, as they are subjects without their own identity. In contrast, a buyer persona does have its own identity, as we know their name, profession, and needs. This way, we can empathize with them much better.

A target encompasses values such as gender, age, and purchasing power – very generic data. However, when we talk about a buyer persona, the information goes much further. We focus on their needs, what they feel, and what worries them.

We could conclude that a target audience is just the skeleton, and a Buyer Persona is the rest of the musculature, including the most important part: the mind.

How Does Having a Buyer Persona Impact Your Company?

Absolutely everything. Having your buyer persona well-defined is not only important, but rather essential. Knowing your customer well is vital and forces you to put them as the absolute protagonist of all your current and future actions.

You need to focus on the customer. The customer is king; you must always keep that in mind. And if you truly want to retain them, by making them happy, the only thing you have to do is strive to get to know them better and thus offer a service or product so perfect for that user that you might even surprise them.

At Izo, we've been surprising and delighting our clients for over 20 years. They are our best endorsement and continue to trust our services to help them achieve better results both inside and outside their companies. We are the leaders in Customer Experience in both Spain and Latin America. We work every day following the latest market trends to continue growing and offer the best service our clients could imagine.

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