What is a Buyer Persona?

Thrifty Tylor, Trendy Sally, and Discount Dolly are not just aesthetic names, they represent different categories of buyers with similar habits, backgrounds, tastes, and decision-making processes, and these are buyers staff.

While Thrifty Tylor only spends his money on what he considers very important, he hardly prefers any brand he has not yet heard of or tried. Stylish Sally has a personality that likes to receive notifications about new fashion styles, always listens to the advice of the influencer she follows, cares not to be left out, and doesn’t care about price as much as she cares about not being left out. Discount Dolly, on the other hand, is a person who only buys when there is a sale, and has times when he can buy discounted products that he has never heard of or tried before.

Often times, companies are all about themselves and rarely listen to what the customer really wants, and building a buyer persona helps to be such a company.

What is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer is a fictional character who represents the ideal customer of a brand, built on the basis of market research of potential and current customers and real data about current customers. In simple terms, buyer persona refers to the description of a consumer’s demographics as well as personality traits and behaviors that will help the marketer evaluate their right audience.

Importance of Building Buyer Personnel

There are steps to take to create a buyer persona that will be helpful for the current brand, and some of these steps are as follows:

• The target audience should be better known,

• Better products should be developed that the audience really wants,

• Better offers should be created to gain more customers,

• Strategies should be developed to establish a long-term relationship with customers,

• Brand personality should be equated with consumer personality or vice versa,

• Gain better information to help create a better unique selling proposition.

Buyer Persona Elements

A buyer responds to the ideal customer who, what, why and how. This requires extensive research into who is buying the offers and who is willing to buy. A perfect persona consists of some elements, which are as follows:

Demographic

Demographics include the ideal client’s age, gender, marital status, family size, income, religion, race, occupation, nationality, etc. related statistical data. It gives a statistical description of the customer segment the company plans to target. Some of the important demographic categories to look for when creating a buyer persona are as follows:

• Age

• Gender

• Marital status

• Number of children (if any)

• Profession

• Annual income

• Education level

• Living situation (landlord or tenant)

Psychographs and behavior

After the buyer’s demographic information is obtained, the buyer’s behavior, personality, values, spending habits or patterns, etc. need to be known. Psychographic and behavioral market segmentation is done to learn more about the customer’s personality, lifestyle and attitude.

The VALS (Value, Attitudes, and Lifestyles) Framework is a proprietary research methodology used to classify consumers into eight psychographic and behavioral types. The eight consumer groups used in this research methodology are as follows:

• Innovators: While these consumers are leading the change, they have high incomes, self-esteem and abundant resources. They also have individual tastes and prefer to buy prestigious goods and services.

• Thinkers: This consumer group is known to be highly resourced and motivated by ideals, while they are mature, responsible and well-educated professionals. They usually spend their leisure time at home, but have knowledge of what’s going on in the world. Their incomes are high, but although they are practical consumers and rational decision makers, they are open to new ideas and social change.

• Believers: This group of consumers has low resources, modest incomes, and is motivated by ideals. These are conservative and predictable consumers who prefer established brands, often their life is family, religious beliefs or the close circle around them.

• Achievers: This consumer group is highly resourced and motivated by achievements. They are successful business-oriented people, they derive satisfaction from their jobs and families. They are politically conservative, respecting authority and status.

Effects

Influencers refer to the forces that affect the buyer’s decision-making process, and these influencers are of two types as external and internal influences:

External effects,

• Culture,

• Subculture,

• Demographics,

• Social status,

• Reference groups,

• Family,

• Marketing activities.

internal effects

• Motives,

• Emotions,

• Personality,

• Perception,

• Learning

These influencers influence the buyer’s decision-making process, but it is also important for the marketer to know why, when and where these influencers influence the buyer’s decision-making process.

Goals, Challenges and Issues

Goal expresses what the customer wants to achieve. It can be classified as primary, secondary and tertiary goals, where the first is most important and the tertiary is of less importance in life. Challenges include conditions and limitations that prevent the client from achieving goals. These difficulties lead to problems for which the customer seeks solutions in a proposal.

How to Create a Buyer Persona

Once the market research is complete, building a buyer persona is not an uphill battle. All you have to do is put the persona items in the right place. There is a buyer persona template to help create a detailed buyer persona, which is as follows:

Buyer persona template

Generally, the buyer persona template consists of four parts. The first part is about the demographics of the customer, the second part is about psychography, the third part is about the goals, challenges and solutions, and the fourth part is the information about why the brand will choose its offer or not. However, some examples of buyer personas are as follows:

• Tyler Dickinson, 26, and Mikaela Pascal, 28, are professional company employees living in Houston and earning $6,444 per month. They are not very tech savvy, looking for a phone that can be useful for their daily routine, work and leisure time. They also want the phone to be of premium quality that makes them stand out from the crowd when they have it. Considering these requests, they see the iPhone as the right phone brand for them to buy, as it is an affordable phone for these people and can meet all their needs and demands.

• Ethan James, 19, and Brittany Cuadra, two 21-year-old college students, earn $480-600 a week in Utah by also working extra jobs for additional and entertainment expenses. Considering their income, for example, although they consume classic and more affordable types of chocolate with milk chocolate, pistachio or cocoa, they also enjoy consuming branded products due to the shape and variety of peanut butter cups and bars.