Buyer Personas—What Are They And Why Should You Care?

Buyer Personas
As we all know, people are different in many ways. What’s important to know, is so are their buying habits. Like it or not, consumers buy things for different reasons. Not a big deal though, right? You can imagine that. But could these different behaviors cause you to be losing money if not addressed properly—OH YEA!

First, let me explain what buyer personas are. From an Internet marketing point of view, a buyer persona is a fictional character drawn up from market and customer research that serves as examples of real life buyer preferences. In short, your job is to construct fictional characters, based on the buying behaviors identified in your research. The purpose for this is to create empathy for your real life customers. If done correctly, you should be able to understand your customer’s inner dialog and be able to create an experience relevant to the context of that dialog.

So what are you looking for?
Ok, the creating a fictional character doesn’t seem to hard, right? But, what should you be looking for? Fortunately there’s a simple answer, there just so happens to be four main personas or types of people, at least that’s what Hippocrates said. Technically though, there have been several types of personas identified, but we’ll just focus on the main four:

•    Competitive – base purchases on quick and logic thinking—they buy things associated with actors, titles, etc.

•    Spontaneous – base purchases on quick and emotional thinking—they buy things associated with top sellers and new releases

•    Methodical – base purchases on deliberate and logical thinking—they buy things by genre and categorization

•    Humanistic – base purchases on deliberate and emotional thinking—they buy based on reviews

Ok, why should you care?
Identifying personas for the purpose of consumer empathy is to help you create more target specific content that essentially appeals to more of your already targeted audience. Keep in mind, just because you’ve identified your niche or target audience doesn’t mean you’ve created content specific to all of your consumers. After you find your main audience, you then have to consider their personas and ‘talk their walk.’

So, supposing you’re creating a marketing campaign. Taking into consideration your newly learned awareness of personas, you should start to see that one Web page doesn’t fit all. A good marketer may create more than one version of the same campaign Web page, ad, etc.

Remember back to my post about ‘call to actions?’ Take a look again at the mock up I created. You’ll notice I’m offering four different brochures. Any idea why? Because each brochure is catering to the specifics of each of the four main buyer personas.

Now does that mean that offering four different versions of something means you’ve catered to the main personas?—no, not necessarily, it depends on your marketing needs. For instance, I could have created four separate Web pages displaying only the dialog of one persona at a time. But even then, the ways in which personas get catered to isn’t limited to my examples. You need to find out how to incorporate buyer personas into your strategy.

Lack of awareness or abandonment of the buyer personas notion could possibly be the reason why online conversion rates are so low. Even though you may have truly identified your niche audience that doesn’t mean you’re actually talking to all of the different personalities your consumers have.

Talk the talk, so you can walk the walk... all the way to the bank!