What is a Buyer Persona and Why Is It Important in Marketing?

Marketing is the realm of mysterious definitions, deciphered almost exclusively by professionals. This is also due to the fact that many English expressions are used, and their meaning is not always immediately clear. Among the many questions that less experienced people often ask is what a Buyer Persona is, a tool increasingly important in a digitalized, more fragmented world with ever more information to interpret in order to stand out from the competition.

What is a Buyer Persona?

The use of the term ‘persona,’ understood as the creation of profiles of users who visit a website, is attributed to Alan Cooper, a software designer and programmer who applied this methodology to his field of work to create user-friendly software. The result of his study was the 1988 publication of ‘The Inmates Are Running the Asylum’, a book that explained what a Buyer Persona is, a concept that quickly spread to several sectors, especially digital marketing.

Buyer personas are fictional representations of a company’s typical customers, created from data collected through surveys or interviews, considering not only their sociodemographic, psychographic, and behavioral characteristics, but also personal information, quotes, and ways of speaking that may be useful in the creation of products/services.

The interviews aim to ‘understand the individual,’ seeking to go beyond the numbers and statistics related to purchases and preferences. All the information collected and analyzed allows experts to create archetypes from which brands can align their marketing strategy and positioning. Therefore, a Buyer Persona is essentially the representative of a type of customer identified by a specific interest in the company or its products, or a problem that these products or services can solve.

They are archetypes or patterns resulting from information provided by consumers and users. Using a Buyer Persona involves starting from the study of real clients to guide business and marketing strategies capable of driving engagement, conversion, and loyalty of new buyers.

How to Create a Buyer Persona

Creating these archetypes allows you to understand who the clients or users of a website are, but also how they think, what they are looking for, and what goals and reasons guide their behavior, as well as their purchasing methods and timing.

To understand how to create a Buyer Persona and build the profile of that ideal client or user, it is necessary to consider different types of consumer information and proceed to collect data through survey tools that allow ‘listening’ to people. In a subsequent phase, the data must be processed to accurately and precisely identify and construct the different Buyer Personas.

There are several tools that allow the collection of information needed to create a Buyer Persona. Social networks and, therefore, tools such as Facebook Audience Insights, as well as Google Analytics, can be very useful for collecting large amounts of demographic data, locating the times when each user group is most active on the target website, and identifying their geographic origin and related interests.

What is the Purpose of a Buyer Persona?

Very often, when establishing a target, people think mainly in demographic terms. Attention is usually focused on gender, age group, and the geographic area from which users come. In reality, what works best is not so much knowing this information, but knowing the behavioral and motivational data of macrogroups and user segments that reach the website.

The profiles created are useful to guide decision-making related to multiple aspects of the business. Among these, for example, the creation and definition of product features, services, and points of sale, as well as defining the structure and layout of a website. They also serve to establish marketing strategies and brand positioning to communicate brand proposals to different client groups as appropriately and personalized as possible.

As is taught to everyone who decides to pursue marketing professionally, and particularly digital marketing, today learning how to create a Buyer Persona is a fundamental skill for developing a successful commercial strategy. In addition to field practice, academically all these techniques can be learned by pursuing, for example, a Master in Consumer Behavior and Marketing Insights or a Master in Marketing Management.

Differences Between Buyer Persona and Target

There are significant differences between a Buyer Persona and a target. The traditional approach to identifying the target for a product, service, or message is based on collecting primarily quantitative data, obtained through statistical analysis and sociodemographic information, as well as information related to purchasing behavior and channel preferences.

However, this type of research is not sufficient to identify the psychological nuances of the average client or website user. In fact, although defining the target is essential to understand where to focus company resources and identify business aspects that need optimization, target identification only clarifies ‘what’ to offer, but not ‘how’ to offer it to all clients/users.

When planning a marketing strategy, it is necessary to create content aimed at different target groups of interest, since a generalist and non-personalized communication does not align with the diverse ways of communicating and reasoning of different clients.

To truly understand a target and create content that is genuinely relevant to potential clients, one must begin to think like them. This is precisely the purpose of a Buyer Persona. In fact, the idea behind this concept is to understand the target individual so well that you almost start seeing the world as they do.