Que tipo de cliente sua empresa deseja alcançar? Para quem faz conteúdo? A sua empresa está se comunicando adequadamente com seu cliente ideal? Se você hesitou em responder a uma dessas perguntas, provavelmente não sabe quem é a buyer persona - ou pelo menos não pensou sobre isso, certo?

Mas não se preocupe! Agora você está no lugar certo. Estamos aqui para te explicar

• o que é buyer persona para que você não confunda com o público-alvo;
• por que é importante para as empresas;
• e como criar sua própria buyer persona.

O que é Persona do Comprador?

Buyer persona is a widely used concept in digital marketing that helps us to make a representation of our ideal costumer among those who compose your target audience. Basically speaking, a buyer person is a fiction character created by real data and researches with the current customers and with the potential ones. 

We can say that the company’s buyer persona is the ideal customer for your business, so let’s see why using this technique is one of the most important parts of any marketing strategy for having success in sales. Check it out:

Buyer personas were invented to help companies to create an effective communication with their buyers by an empathic approach.

Without buyer personas businesses are in the risk of developing products or campaigns completely generic and faceless. In this way, companies can’t neither be truly connected with their audience nor resolve their necessities or problems.

When you get to know better your target audience, your ideal customer, all your actions start making sense. That's why several companies started creating a fictional persona to guide them when taking any actions related to sales.

A great issue however is how to find satisfactory quantity of information about who is exactly your ideal customer, although this task is not impossible to accomplish. In order to do that you must collect several data extracted by tests and researches with your current and future customers.

Afterwards, you ought to put them together in a single datasheet of a character to be consulted always when deciding an action to be taken, wether it’s related to marketing, selling or developing any kind of goods or services.

But calm down! We’ll understand better this theme in a a while. That’s because, before we move on, we have to understand the difference between buyer persona and target audience. It will help you to understand the peculiarities and the real importance of a buyer persona.

What’s the difference between buyer persona and target audience?

A lot of people confuse these terms because of their proximity and, besides, a lot of contents in the internet treat these concepts as synonyms.

What is target audience?

Target audience is more broader and wider representation of your customers. Generally, it is composed of a portion of the population by common characteristic. For this reason is common to use data and demographic terms to build your target audience, in examples like:

Gender

• Age;
• Income;
• Social class;
• Geographic location;
• Profession;
• Education.

In this train of thought, we can say that a possible target audience is: man, between 20 and 30 years old, middle class, brazilian, living in Rio de Janeiro, degree in Business, employed in a medium-sized enterprise and now is in search of new professional challenges.

A lot of people sill fit in this profile, right? So, as we saw before, a buyer persona is created to make it more real and palpable this ideal customer. That’s why the buyer persona represents a real person that makes it possible to to treat consumers in a more specific and personal way. It’s your ideal buyer in the middle of the crowd.

and a persona

With that said, besides social and demographic data, to build a buyer persona you must collect data with specific details, such as psychology characteristics and behaviour from a specific group of buyers. Among the information that should appear in you ideal customer profile, are:

• Name;
• Age;
• Gender;
• Profession;
• Education;
• Problems and fears;
• Goals;
• Personal preferences;
• Quality aimed from goods or services;
• Life-style;
• Moral values;
• Personality.

These are only a few aspects of what a buyer persona could be. In this way, your buyer persona can look like this:

Ster, 25 years old woman, middle class, living in Campo Grande, Rio de Janeiro. She has a degree in Business and a post-graduation in Marketing; works in a medium-sized enterprise of tourism. Now, she wants to develop her professional training. Although her life is very busy during the week, she’s always trying to get latest news and updates related to professional life. She likes photographing and wanted to dedicate more time on that.

For a more accurate profile, you want to be as more specific as you can. You can even tell a story, like the one that follows: “Ster needs this kind of service but have had bad experiences with related companies, and now she is looking for a more innovative company.”

Could you understand how to defyne you ideal customer and the difference between persona and target audience? It’s important, in order to build your buyer persona, to have a wider research that includes different aspects like personal data, profession, interests and habits.

In doing so, you can have a clearer vision of your ideal customer profile and direct better your actions in a more effective way.

Another important issue to add is that it is possible to create several buyer personal profiles according to business necessities – specially when it has a broader audience.

What’s the buyer persona’s importance?

When setting up your ideal customer profile, you will be able to direct the communication to the right people and using the proper language. By this technique you can have a sight, or mental perception, of with whom your talking to. Having handy a detailed profile of your buyer persona, allows you to easily recognize the most appropriate way of speaking. This approach will make your business more relevant for those who end up in your advertisements and contents, and eventually lead you to successful sales.

To sum up: defining you buyer persona is important to your company because it will help you to communicate properly to you ideal customer profile, in any kind of marketing strategy: in copywriting for direct marketing, or contents, posts and advertisements for indirect marketing or branding.

These are some of possible impacts when using your buyer persona:

• eliminate wrong or dissonant assumptions each individual can have – you will now offer more solid characteristics based in the reality;
• offer to your personnel a consistent and memorable image of your ideal customer – this will make the process of creating marketing strategies much easier;
• make it possible to you team to imagine hypothetical scenarios, in order to answer all the needs of specific users and even avoid that some exceptions harm your sales;
• have a clear vision of your ideal client’s face. It promotes empathy and also discernment, rather than dubious or non sense hypothesis.

In other words, creating a digital marketing strategy, ones sales, client support and products development, or services provision, will become way easier and way effective.

How to create a persona?

Since you have now learnt what is a persona, what about creating your own persona? As said before, to create a persona you have to make a research and start a “dig” process. Are you ready?

1. Making a detailed research of you ideal customer

Here you have some of things you should discover about your costumers:

Search for social and demographic data

This is the first one of the several information you should collect to build a persona. You should ask about their sexuality, gender, age, religion, etc.

Generally, these are the first questions that appear in questionnaires, being one of the basis for your future persona.

Professional information

You also want to know their job position, field of activity and their daily routine. Knowing that you persona is a doctor, for example, can help you to understand better his or her intention when buying a product or service. 

Your ideal customer goals

Knowing what are their goals can help you to guide your actions in a more strategic way. Ask then what does your client want to reach when aquiringf your good or services and how they can achieve this goal. In other words, how could he or she would like to be helped.

The answers will give you a wider overview when building a persona.

Ask them about their daily life problems

It may happens that your potential clients don’t have necessities to be met, since they already have a solution with a competition. But they aren’t quite happy with that… So how do you act in a situation like that?

Supposing you have an e-commerce for beauty products and found out that your future clients’ goals are to look younger. By making this research you can find out, for example, that their biggest problem is the quality and the cost of the products that are being consumed.

Here you have it! You can then make your communication based in this precise aspect, saying for example that you ideal customer don’t have to spend tonnes of money to look younger.

Understanding the persona’s interests

Knowing their interests is an important role when describing you buyer persona. With this information in mind your character will have more depth increasing the chances of excelents big ideas in your digital marketing strategy.

Pergunte sobre seus hábitos de compra - por exemplo, quanto dinheiro gasta mensalmente ou se compra mais em sites ou em lojas físicas. Você também deseja saber onde eles são informados e atualizados sobre temas relacionados ao seu produto ou serviço.

Como você pode obter e gerenciar todos esses dados? Existem muitas opções! Você pode usar questionários online, entrevistas, sistema de CRM, pesquisas de email e anylise de dados do seu site ou mídia social.

2. Compreender como você pode ajudar sua persona do comprador

Agora que você tem todo esse conhecimento à mão, é hora de entender como você pode ajudar seu cliente ideal a atender às suas necessidades e resolver seus problemas. Com isso, atingirão seus objetivos pessoais ou profissionais.

In order to truly know your role in yout client’s life, start thinking about the resources that your product can offer and analyse what it really offer as benefits to your ideal customer. That is, what your product does and how it improves and facilitates their final clients. That’s what makes your product different from the competition.

Take this moment to analyze wether the customer impression on your company is befitting with what you want to be recognized, or not. If it’s not, you should give another thought on your branding positioning.

Now it’s up to you!

Understanding your target audience and creating a persona is the best way for you to have a better communication, more effective and customized. If you are not sure about how to speak or with whom, and start working with vague assumptions, your company won’t achieve the ideal customer. And you also probably won’t be able to accomplish new sales. So make researches, plan and build your persona to avoid losing your clients.

Now it’s up to you!

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