Recently, the subject of buyer personas has become increasingly prevalent as companies seek innovative and more efficient methods to engage with their customers and potential clients. While they’re more popular than ever, some may still be asking, “What is a buyer persona?” and “Why should I care?” One thing is certain: segmentation research is essential for defining buyer personas.
What is a Buyer Persona?
It isn’t difficult to find many different answers to the above question, and most aren’t particularly enlightening. We at PROOF Insights believe that it should be descriptive enough to both know how to recognize one when you see it, and simple enough to understand their utility.
Shopify defines personas as:
“A persona is a research-based, fictional, generalized character that represents your business’s target users or customers. Personas are idealized clients—characters with the exact pain points your product solves, the goals your product or service helps achieve, and sensibilities that align with your brand.”
We would also add “where they are buying and when they are buying” to this definition, as these criteria are valuable to marketers for obvious reasons.
We like this definition, chiefly because it demands a more scientific approach to developing personas than relying on “tribal knowledge” or stopping short at segmentations without adding the additional considerations that make them personas.
Personas may be based on differences in demographics, firmographics, buying behaviors, customer journey and /or many other attributes. If developed scientifically (meaning they are backed by quantitative and/or qualitative research), a company’s personas can be used across all of its departments. Overall, personas provide a summarized glimpse into groups of customers or potential customers for your business.
What Isn’t a Buyer Persona
When you think about breaking your customer base into groups, you may be tempted to think that persona development is merely a segmentation exercise. Let’s be clear; while developing a proper segmentation of your customers and prospects is a key step in persona development, your market segments are not your buyer personas. Strictly speaking, personas are a form of segmentation, but they aren’t typically viewed in that sense. The process of building buyer personas requires the use of at least one segmentation, and sometimes several, but the creation of personas involves additional considerations about customers and their journey to making their purchasing decisions on products like yours.
Don’t get us wrong: segmentation research is essential for defining buyer personas, but you aren’t finished there. Personas take your segmentations to the next level of utility.
Buyer Personas Are for Everyone
Whether your company is B2B or B2C, buyer personas can be used to help focus your team’s messages and marketing mix and methods. Not only do they help the marketing department make choices about content and the mediums they use to reach the customer base, they also can help the sales department make decisions about their sales approaches.
Personas that work are Research-Based
A very important part of this definition that can be easily overlooked are the words “research based.” This is such an important phrase because it highlights the need to base the customer information you use to develop buyer personas on solid science; on research. In the upcoming series, we will be unpacking the key elements of the buyer persona development process, including the indispensable research aspect of the effort.