What is a buyer persona?
Buyer personas help businesses understand and empathise with their customers so they can better acquire and serve them.
A buyer persona is an insight-based profile that brings a target customer to life. Buyer personas describe your ideal customers, their days, the challenges they face, and how they make decisions. They should be based on research rather than gut feeling so they are real and at arm’s length.
It’s common to have multiple buyer personas for a business. But each individual involved in a buying decision is a separate persona with different criteria for evaluating your product. You’ll need different strategies to address those needs.
Buyer persona development
Some people might define a buyer persona as a description of your buyer — but in reality, it’s so much more than that.
A buyer persona is a complex picture of your ideal customer, informed by real data, in-depth market research, and customer insights specific to your business. It’s a tool to help you wade through the vast amount of potential customers and hone in on the right target audience where your marketing spend will be most effective.
When crafted effectively, a buyer persona helps you create sophisticated and segmented marketing solutions that offer potential customers exactly what they want.
By meeting customers’ needs with your brand’s offering, you can create an authentic and meaningful connection that will keep them coming back for more.
How to create a buyer persona?
With that in mind, here are some ideas for buyer persona development:
- Segmentation effectively supports persona creation. But it is not required if you have enough data to understand your target and the 5 W’s (Who, What, When, Where, Why) around this.
- Insights to inform buyer persona development will give you better, more actionable personas. But these do not just need to be based on primary research. Research helps to inform personas.
- Conduct a brainstorming session to transition from segment/group to persona or create the personas with your team. Use a template to help develop your personas and pressure test them in the business.
The benefits of using buyer personas
Buyer personas aren’t just a nice-to-have. They’re a valuable tool in the fight to win over customers. In a competitive marketplace, having well-defined buyer personas can win you so many benefits, including:
- Customer loyalty
- Better, more effective marketing spend
- Opportunities for effective advertising segmentation
- A chance to stand out from the competition
- More streamlined customer communications with the right channels
With these buyer personas in place, you can also more effectively identify target audiences that you are not currently targeting, allowing you to identify these blind spots and carve out a larger share of the market.
Ruby Cha Cha – your buyer persona development experts
As experts in market research and customer insights, we have years of experience developing buyer personas that get to the heart of your brand and customer base. We use a combination of the latest tools and time-honoured research techniques to build up a picture of your buyer personas that are based on evidence and will help you create actionable insights.
Want to know more?
If you have questions about using a market research online community for your company. Or if you have general questions about market research online communities and how they can help your company deliver more value to your customers. Drop us a line at info@rubychacha.com.au, visit our website at www.rubychacha.com.au or call us on 8094 6800.