What is a buyer persona in marketing and how to define it?
Posted: Sun Jan 05, 2025 9:22 am
You may have already heard of the customer avatar, buyer persona or marketing persona. This notion emerged in 1999 in the book "The inmates are running the asylum" published by Alan Cooper, but it resurfaced a few years ago with the development of inbound marketing techniques.
The term buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer, based on market research and real data from your real customers. In other words, personas should represent your targets, the people who are likely to buy your products or services. Typically, a company has between two and five customer avatars. There are no rules, but we recommend focusing on quality over quantity, otherwise you risk spreading yourself too thin and losing relevance.
Why define personas, what are the advantages?
Whether in BtoB or BtoC, we can say that this step is essential for building brazil phone number list marketing strategy since it allows a company to know who it is addressing in order to adapt its message, the aim being to attract and sell! You can implement all the actions in the world, if you have not defined a customer avatar, you are likely to miss the mark and waste money.
The advantage of this method is that it is much more in-depth in thinking than traditional segmentation techniques. Indeed, rather than imagining addressing a category of people, the personification of your typical customer will allow you to be much more precise in your speech and your argument.
Defining the buyer persona:
step 1, ask yourself the right questions.
The first step in defining your customer avatars is to ask yourself different questions to come up with precise profiles. Here's what you need to ask yourself:
What are their socio-demographic characteristics? Gender, age, place of residence (in the city, in the countryside, etc.), family situation (single, married, with or without children), sector of activity and position held, income, standard of living, etc.
What are his interests and habits? Does he like reading (if yes, books, magazines, blogs?), going to the cinema, playing sports, going out with friends? Does he have a smartphone, a PC? Does he shop online?
What are his goals and aspirations? For example: "he would like to advertise via Facebook to collect qualified contacts and increase his turnover."
What are his fears, his obstacles? For example, "He's afraid it will cost him too much because he doesn't have much money."
With the knowledge you have of your customers, you can come up with a persona by asking yourself the questions above. Not really inspired? Don't hesitate to carry out a competitive analysis by looking at what is being done elsewhere. However, all this will remain just supposition, it is better to validate the information using real data.
Defining the buyer persona:
Step 2, verify assumptions with real customer data.
But then, how do you validate these assumptions? First, ask your customers questions to collect data about them. To do this, you can use polls or surveys, ask them questions on social networks or by meeting them. You may be wondering what interest your customers would have in answering a survey about their habits and interests? They will have one if you give them something in exchange for a completed form (promo code for example).
The second solution is to collect data about your customers using tools such as Google Analytics or Facebook Audience Insights. For example, the second solution is available if you have a page with more than 1000 subscribers, you will then be able to have precise information about these people such as their socio-demographic data and their interests (with the pages they follow for example).
The persona at the heart of the digital strategy
Defining your personas will influence and guide your digital strategy, especially if you want to do inbound marketing. As a reminder, inbound consists of attracting the attention of prospects and letting them come to you through specifically designed content. The challenge will be to transform the visitor into a lead (qualified contact) and then convert them into a customer, then into an ambassador for your brand.
Having established personas will allow you to know who you are addressing, through which channel and in what manner. Indeed, you will have identified the motivations and obstacles of your targets, which will allow you to use arguments that will hit the mark to convince them. If you know what your buyer personas want, you will be able to offer them a solution at the right time, with the right product or service. Similarly, as part of your media purchases (for example on Google Ads), you will have a more precise idea of the targeting to be carried out, based on the demographic data and interests that you have identified.
The term buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer, based on market research and real data from your real customers. In other words, personas should represent your targets, the people who are likely to buy your products or services. Typically, a company has between two and five customer avatars. There are no rules, but we recommend focusing on quality over quantity, otherwise you risk spreading yourself too thin and losing relevance.
Why define personas, what are the advantages?
Whether in BtoB or BtoC, we can say that this step is essential for building brazil phone number list marketing strategy since it allows a company to know who it is addressing in order to adapt its message, the aim being to attract and sell! You can implement all the actions in the world, if you have not defined a customer avatar, you are likely to miss the mark and waste money.
The advantage of this method is that it is much more in-depth in thinking than traditional segmentation techniques. Indeed, rather than imagining addressing a category of people, the personification of your typical customer will allow you to be much more precise in your speech and your argument.
Defining the buyer persona:
step 1, ask yourself the right questions.
The first step in defining your customer avatars is to ask yourself different questions to come up with precise profiles. Here's what you need to ask yourself:
What are their socio-demographic characteristics? Gender, age, place of residence (in the city, in the countryside, etc.), family situation (single, married, with or without children), sector of activity and position held, income, standard of living, etc.
What are his interests and habits? Does he like reading (if yes, books, magazines, blogs?), going to the cinema, playing sports, going out with friends? Does he have a smartphone, a PC? Does he shop online?
What are his goals and aspirations? For example: "he would like to advertise via Facebook to collect qualified contacts and increase his turnover."
What are his fears, his obstacles? For example, "He's afraid it will cost him too much because he doesn't have much money."
With the knowledge you have of your customers, you can come up with a persona by asking yourself the questions above. Not really inspired? Don't hesitate to carry out a competitive analysis by looking at what is being done elsewhere. However, all this will remain just supposition, it is better to validate the information using real data.
Defining the buyer persona:
Step 2, verify assumptions with real customer data.
But then, how do you validate these assumptions? First, ask your customers questions to collect data about them. To do this, you can use polls or surveys, ask them questions on social networks or by meeting them. You may be wondering what interest your customers would have in answering a survey about their habits and interests? They will have one if you give them something in exchange for a completed form (promo code for example).
The second solution is to collect data about your customers using tools such as Google Analytics or Facebook Audience Insights. For example, the second solution is available if you have a page with more than 1000 subscribers, you will then be able to have precise information about these people such as their socio-demographic data and their interests (with the pages they follow for example).
The persona at the heart of the digital strategy
Defining your personas will influence and guide your digital strategy, especially if you want to do inbound marketing. As a reminder, inbound consists of attracting the attention of prospects and letting them come to you through specifically designed content. The challenge will be to transform the visitor into a lead (qualified contact) and then convert them into a customer, then into an ambassador for your brand.
Having established personas will allow you to know who you are addressing, through which channel and in what manner. Indeed, you will have identified the motivations and obstacles of your targets, which will allow you to use arguments that will hit the mark to convince them. If you know what your buyer personas want, you will be able to offer them a solution at the right time, with the right product or service. Similarly, as part of your media purchases (for example on Google Ads), you will have a more precise idea of the targeting to be carried out, based on the demographic data and interests that you have identified.