Jun 13, 2020
Buyer Personas
Why it’s still important to define them
Buyer personas are a very important aspect to define after having chosen the objective they will be used for, which is the most important step of the strategy definition. It’s only when you reach the phase of target audience determining, that buyer personas come into consideration.
In 1999 Alan Cooper wrote The Inmates are Running the Asylum. Here is the first mention of buyer personas, which moved us progressively towards a human-centered design which generated an unprecedented user-friendly experience.
Creating the profile of your buyer persona allows you to follow a marketing approach centered on people, a strategy development guided by users, essential to building a process that is able to address the user towards your content.
How do we build the profile of a buyer persona?
First of all, we need to start out with some data about our target audience, examining it in an in-depth manner, applying a data-driven strategy.
The data we use will be of two types:
- owned (to collect)
- public (needs verification)
We use our data to build a story, the story of our buyer, which is the main character and the person we want to direct our marketing efforts towards. Often buyer personas drive us onto the wrong path of identifying ourselves with them so, the first step to building an effective profile is making sure its characteristics are distant from ourselves and from our acquaintances.
Why is this? Anyone of our acquaintances is possibly an outlier so the data-driven building is vital.
Summarizing our audience means creating our buyer persona and it won’t be perfect at the beginning. The important things to keep in mind are:
- Choose the easiest solution
People are simple and want simple interfaces
- Use numbers but don’t forget to add creativity
- Learn from your mistakes
Analyze the data and make your buyer persona better
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