What is a buyer persona?

The buyer persona is a comprehensive description of your key target audience(s). Your buyer persona is put together based on thoughtful research. Knowing that target audience is one of the most crucial parts of a successful marketing strategy. After all, you will create your content that aligns with the needs and wants of your target audience. What drives your target audience? What are their key challenges? What problems are they experiencing? 

How do you define a buyer persona?

Collecting information

In the first phase, you will collect information about your customers. This includes:

• demographic data: such as gender, age, income…
• background data: education, level of education, career…
• typical data: behaviour, hobbies, interests, favourite brands, preferences for media channels…

A buyer persona does not represent one specific target audience but characterises the corresponding (buying) behaviour and the way in which goals are achieved. It makes no sense to draw up a buyer persona for every target audience.

Goals and pain points

In the next phase, you dig deeper and find out what the wishes, needs and problems are. The central question here is ‘how do you offer an answer to this with your product’?

Why is a buyer persona so important?

Every customer goes through a certain customer’s journey. You want to turn a person who is not familiar with your brand into a customer. Sending the right content at the right time is very important for this. It goes without saying that having a good insight into your target audience is essential for giving the right information to each lead, depending on which stage in the customer’s journey they are in. 

Not only the content you can adjust depending on your target audience, but also the channels on which you will mainly focus. How does your potential customer search for information? Do they search in Google? Are they active on social media, and on which channels? Do they read blogs? Understanding these factors will ensure that you can focus your inbound marketing efforts on the right channel.

Of course, defining your buyer personas is only one part of your entire online marketing strategy.