Persona Development: Who Buyers Are

Persona development is all about knowing your customers. Marketing research validates your assumptions.

You might think knowing who your buyers are is very straightforward, and you would not be alone. Although every company has a basic understanding of their target audience (young/old, male/female, married/single, industry type, etc.), truly understanding who your buyers are requires a systematic marketing research effort.

 

The Fundamental Breakdowns

Developing personas can be a time-consuming effort, but having and utilizing effective personas can be incredibly beneficial to your business. Even if you feel confident you already know basic information about your customers, it’s important to have it validated through marketing research.

Segmentation research will help reveal or confirm important information about your fundamental customer groups such as demographics, firmographics, geographic, and behavioral segmentations.

Demographics: The core of identity. What is their age, gender, ethnicity, income?

Firmographics: Provides information about organizations. What industry is it in? Is the organization made up of 10 employees or 10,000? Are the company’s sales $50 Million or $5 Billion per year? Is the organization a for-profit or non-profit?

Geographic: Segments audience based on location. This could be city, state, country, region, county, etc.

Behavioral/Transactional: Provides information regarding how buyers behave with respect to habits, frequency, applications, and more.

 

Buyers are More Than a Collection of Demographics

Buyers' identities are frequently expressed in terms of demographics. Are your buyers mothers with children in elementary school? Are they single men between 25 and 40? Do they hold a certain job title or perform a specific function? These are all useful pieces of information that are necessary components in creating basic market segments (you don’t necessarily want to advertise your men’s body spray in a parenting magazine), but they don’t tell the whole story.

Buyers, whether they be consumers or facilities managers in a B2B environment looking to purchase goods or services for their business, are all human and subject to more complex thought processes. This human characterization is the very essence of the buyer persona. To delve further into these complicated thought processes, more advanced segmentations should be utilized, such as:

Psychographics (or attitudes): How do they think about life in general, their place in it, and how your product or service fits within it? What are their values? How do those personal values interact with their purchase decisions?

Motivators: Are they motivated by safety? Is personal comfort more important? Is convenience a major motivator? Are they looking for better efficiency or productivity so they can perform better and make themselves look better? These are frequently a level down from the top tier emotions or attitudes and are frequently more actionable.

Needs: How urgently is your product or service needed for their life or business? To what degree are you relevant or perhaps necessary to them? If not now, will they need you at some point in the future? Do they even know they need you?

If you can answer these questions, you are several steps closer to defining your buyer personas - fully understanding who your buyers really are and how to reach them effectively.

 

Who is Responsible for Buying?

In addition to understanding the demographics, psychographics, motivators, and needs of your buyers, you need to understand the difference between a buyer and an influencer – and define personas for each. In some cases, they are the same person (in a micro business, for example, where the owner does everything). In most cases, however, there are multiple influencers who may not make the final decision but whose opinion has a major impact. These define roles that are played in the buying process, and are critical to developing a robust set of personas for your marketing needs.

These roles can apply in business or consumer settings. In a household, one spouse may have more influence over one type of product than another (these are often still very stereotypical, but traditional gender roles are eroding daily). In a business environment, influencers can have a major impact on what gets purchased within budget constraints. Even though they are not the actual buyer, you cannot ignore their role in the purchase process. In healthcare settings, the lines change seemingly on a daily basis, when vendor evaluation committees are convened to decide on new products and services. GPOs have mitigated the impact of physician opinion on device purchases, but physicians will ultimately influence device purchases to a degree since they are the ones who make use of these devices on actual patients. In this case, you may have a persona that details the purchasing or materials management staffer and their motivations, and the physicians who have their own.

 

Don’t Limit Your Personas

While every company must create its own set of buyer personas specific to their product or service, it is important they not limit themselves to what they already assume to be true or to a non-scientifically developed set of personas. Your research partner should work with you to identify all potential buyers and influencers, and create a persona plan so you can effectually market to them on a comprehensive, human level. You may elect to combine buyers into categories after the fact, but you have to start with all possible options before doing so.

Putting in the research effort now allows you to create marketing and sales materials that will target your buyers effectively for years to come.

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