What is a Buyer Persona?

Whether you are just starting a business, or have been selling your products for years, you know the importance of marketing. The way you approach marketing can make or break your business, which is why it’s crucial that you understand some of the most common terms used.

What is a Buyer Persona?

The term buyer persona is used to describe the ideal customer that your product is targeting. Think of this as the hypothetical individual that you want buying and using your products. A buyer persona goes beyond just a broad and blanket archetype.

This persona will include more specific details like age ranges, income bracket, what their days are like, and what kind of challenges that they may face in their lives. It is alright to have more than one buyer persona, but you need to make sure that you are really thinking through this customer model. This persona will be built through market research and general data about your clients.

Why is a Buyer Persona Important?

Buyer personas are important when it comes to marketing because it helps you to avoid advertising too generally. Marketing that is not targeted properly will inevitably be ineffective. The best way to sell your product is to make a person feel a connection to it and feel like it will help better their lives. But when you don’t have a buyer persona, you can end up with advertisements or marketing that is so broad that they don’t connect with your ideal customer.

While you don’t have to only market to one persona, you need to make sure that your marketing is relatable to those personas and will strike a chord with them. For example, if your product is for school supplies, you’d want to create a buyer persona for students as well as the parents buying them. By focusing your marketing to these groups, you can increase your sales.

Alternatively, if you just advertise to everyone in general, without any focus on those target groups, you risk seeming generic and not memorable.

What Does Target Market Mean?

Target markets are the demographic of people you most want to be buying and using your products. While buyer personas are based more on what customers you are aiming for, target markets are a core group of people that will benefit from buying your product.

Target market looks at groups, rather than looking to define a specific type of person. Target markets play a vital role in how you chose the designs of your products, where they are located, and how you advertise them.

Defining Your Target Market

Your target market needs to be a specific group or groups of people, without being too overly specific or too general.

For example, you may want to advertise to new businesses or to people in their early twenties, but these parameters are too general to be considered a target market. Instead, you’d want to focus on the group that is most likely to buy from you. This will be determined largely by statistical analysis and gathering data about who your product is most desired by.

Having a clear picture of who you need to be advertising to means you can spend your advertising budget more wisely and avoid wasting money on the wrong markets. It is also important to look at your competitors and see what they are doing. It is a good way to see what works and what doesn’t, while also making sure you aren’t too similar.

What is an Ideal Customer Within a Target Market?

Ideal customers are a subgroup within a target market that you can expect to buy your products and use them regularly. They are the group that gets the most out of your product and will continue to buy, even without steady advertisements towards them. By aiming your marketing towards them as well, you can potentially increase the frequency of their purchases, or the likelihood they will tell friends about your product.

If you are having trouble seeing the difference between target markets and buyer personas, that is normal. These terms, along with the phrase “ideal customer” are often used interchangeably when it comes to marketing, even though there are differences in the meanings.

It is important to look at all three as important foundations of marketing for your business. There is no need to pick which one you think will work best for your company. Instead, get the research done and analyze it to create three different categories.

Start with the broadest category, which is the target market, by creating a basic list of facts about your current customers like gender, age range, income range and general location. You can then look at your ideal customer within that target market. This is someone who will naturally buy the product, even without necessarily needing to see ads. They are also the people who will be most likely to return for more purchases in the future.

Finally, you can create a buyer persona, getting much more detailed about your customers by creating a hypothetical person in need of your product. This will include creating a fictional person with more specific characteristics you can use to better put yourself in your buyer’s shoes.

In Summary

Don’t waste your money and resources on trying to get the wrong people to buy your product. To get the most out of your marketing and see the best results, you need to look at the research and pay attention to who really wants and needs your products. A digital marketing specialist will be able to help you direct your resources towards the right audience and analyze what will be most effective in getting them to buy. You will then see a larger profit and a better return on your investment. All of that starts with knowing who your target market and buyer persona are. See a list of the Top Digital Marketing Companies to find the right agency for you.