Any business has more than one value proposition that it offers and hence has more than one target audience. In addition to that, your value proposition attracts many people that might not be the right target and hence lead to a lower return on investment in advertising spending. This is where the role of a buyer persona comes in. A buyer persona is your ideal target audience. Their age, gender, spending power, need, and profession are what help you humanize your audience and put a face to it.

This is ideal if your business is offering a service or product directly to the customer but in case of a B2B proposition, the buyer persona needs to include the industry you are targeting as well.

Why does your business need a buyer persona?

In the crowded space of e-commerce, you need to stand out. That is the reason why one needs to move away from generic marketing to precision content strategies that will gain you, loyal customers, at a lower cost. This is where the role of the buyer persona steps in. It humanizes your ideal customer by putting a face to a bunch of demographics and numbers. With a buyer persona, you can go beyond the gender, age, geographic region, and income of the person that is your ideal customer to thinking about their hobbies, values, behaviour, and lifestyle.

For instance, you run an online flower shop that specializes in birthday deliveries. This means that you have a wide target audience. You can run a generic ad campaign that will target people based on their gender and income. But this will only help you grab their attention once and just for a few seconds during the search stage. But if you have a buyer profile on the lines of, a young female professional who likes to socialize and spend her surplus income on her family and friends; You will be able to engage with her in a much more organic way. You could reach out to her through your testimonial stories on Instagram or other social media platforms. Through this approach, you can get her attention through content around her interests rather than just her socio-economic profile.

Can there be multiple buyer personas?

The answer to that is an absolute yes. Each buyer persona represents a different target group. It helps you personalize the content and ads in accordance with different personas and needs. This might seem like a lot of work but the results are worth it. I would go as far as to say that it is the need of the hour since customers want to connect with brands and not be targeted by them. Hence any form of personalization in your service offering goes a long way.

Let's continue with our flower shop example from before. You are a favourite among your clients but you have some corporate customers that you need to keep happy as well. In this case, the buyer persona will be someone who is an HR professional in a multinational company that wants to excel in their job. Now to reach and engage with such a customer a simple display ad will get you nowhere. But perhaps a well-timed e-mail campaign advertising the fact that you offer yearly discounts on pre-paid birthday flower services and the option of customization along with it would be a better strategy.

As you can see, having a buyer persona helps you come up with a marketing strategy that encapsulates all aspects of your marketing efforts to different stages of the buyer's life cycle. Not only that but because your business has humanized your target group you automatically take into account that your buyer personas will evolve. You will be able to alter characteristics and behaviour depending on your monthly data. You will be able to engage and tweak your content to stay relevant to your target audience to ensure that they want to stay loyal to your brand.