Buyer persona, the human face of your customer segments

Buyer personas are a useful tool for aligning the marketing, sales and product development actions of your entire organisation with the interests and needs of your customers. By using them, you can improve customer focus and therefore the effectiveness of your campaigns, satisfaction and ultimately the growth of your business. Using buyer personas effectively requires knowing how to create them and above all how to use them to ensure their effectiveness. Find out more about how to create your own buyer personas easily with the help of market research here.

What are buyer personas?

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of one of your ideal customers based on real data and educated guesses. The buyer persona is an archetype. It is not a real person, but a description of a fictitious persona that corresponds to one of your target customer segments. Buyer personas are often used by marketing teams – and sometimes by other teams such as sales or innovation – to better empathise with customers and create greater alignment in the organisation. It is easier to understand customer needs if we can see the people behind the data.

The buyer persona is usually represented in a card with descriptive data about the person that is relevant to understanding the person. A complete and useful buyer persona card should include:

• Name and image or photo that represents that customer archetype. Both the name and the image will be fictitious, but they will show the human face that is so useful for aligning the organisation.
• Demographic data. Generally, we assign age, gender, geographic location, income level, marital status, whether or not they have children, or any other relevant socio-demographic data for the different teams to better understand their profile.
• Personal context to better understand what type of person they are. When we analyse professional clients, it will be very important to know where they work, what position they hold and what their challenges, needs and constraints are. And when we address consumers, it will be important to illustrate their aspirations, general attitudes towards life, hobbies or challenges they face in their daily lives.
• Buying habits and motivations. Focusing on our category of products or services, it will be relevant to know what triggers the purchase, what they look for when choosing a brand, what barriers make them discard options, where they buy, how they buy and everything that is relevant to understand their decision mechanisms.
• Claim or real verbatim, a phrase that helps to understand at first glance what characterises and makes this buyer persona different from others.

Generally, a company works with between 3 and 6 different buyer personas – as many as the number of customer segments it has within its target audience. In this way, each segment is represented by an archetype. This makes it possible to better understand and empathise with each segment for which we want to design products or create campaigns.

Benefits of buyer personas

As we said before, the buyer persona is an archetype, a semi-fictional representation that we have built to illustrate a customer segment. But we could also work with the data-driven description of the segment without creating an archetype. However, when you want to align the organisation and make it more customer-centric, creating buyer personas is a good idea. With buyer personas we can:

• Get the different departments to empathise better with our audiences. It will help you put yourself in their shoes and better understand what they are like, how they feel and what they want.
• Make segments more visible. Buyer personas help to understand that we are targeting groups of customers who share needs, motivations and barriers that are different from other groups and that have to be taken into account to create offers and campaigns that are more adapted to them.
• Have written documentation that illustrates the segments, so that it can be consulted over time to ensure that we do not get sidetracked and that the efforts of all departments are going in the same direction.
• Create better products and campaigns that connect better with each segment as a result of this better understanding.
• Achieve better results more efficiently. With greater alignment to customer needs, debates and initiatives that are not going in the right direction are eliminated. Buyer personas help everyone in the organisation know who they are working for, who they are targeting, and so are more aligned for better results.

Limitations of buyer personas

Buyer personas can be very useful, but they have also been criticised by many marketing experts:

• Oversimplification. Summarising a segment, which in reality incorporates many people, into a single archetype can lead to losing sight of the nuances. For example, a customer segment may be made up of people between 18 and 35 years old. If we represent it by a 27-year-old, some people may lose sight of the richness of the age range.
• Subjective data. A buyer persona is not an objective representation of the segment, but an illustration, a ‘robot portrait’. Some data is used to create it, and some is simply added with a certain amount of imagination (albeit based on our knowledge of the segment). This can lead to extreme idealisations of our customers, which we know will generally have many more edges.
• Irrelevant data. Excessively detailed buyer personas can distract from what is really important. That’s why we need to create simple buyer personas. Less is more.
• Theoretical exercise. Buyer personas will be useful if they are used as a tool by a variety of departments. They will need to be communicated and internalised by everyone in the relevant departments of the organisation.

When deciding to create buyer personas, it is important to be aware of these limitations to reduce their negative impact and ensure the success of the initiative.

Market research to create your buyer personas

The better your knowledge of your customers, the better your buyer personas will be. Market research helps you get the data you need to create target buyer personas.

Sometimes you will be able to get data about your customers from internal sources. For example, an online shop will have a lot of behavioural data on which to build buyer personas. However, you may need to complement another part, the part that has more to do with motivations, with ad-hoc research projects. And if you don’t have direct access to your customers or consumers, you will need to carry out surveys to gather the information you need.

Some common types of surveys in buyer persona creation projects are:

• Segmentation surveys. If buyer personas are to be illustrative of your customer segments, the first thing you will need to do is segment your clientele or consumers. A segmentation survey allows you to identify them and describe their profiles quantitatively and accurately. To do this, you will need to send out a survey, either to your database or to people who are part of a consumer panel.
• In-depth interviews. This research technique allows you to collect qualitative data at the individual level, with real consumers or users, which will help you to illustrate your buyer personas. Two or three in-depth interviews with real people in each segment may be enough for you to gather all the details you need.

Research for creating buyer personas with We are testers

If you are creating buyer personas and need to conduct research, we can help you. The We are testers research platform allows you to combine both methodologies, always with the full support of a team of research experts who will help you with everything you need. And if you don’t have access to your clients or customers, don’t worry. At We are testers we have a panel of 130,000 consumers and users among which we will find the exact sample you need.

Contact us for more details and create your buyer personas with accurate information.