Buyer persona: What it is and why it is fundamental to your customer conversion

Marketing is demanding, requiring more and better strategies all the time to attract, appeal, differentiate, and most importantly, achieve a sale. There are many ways to accomplish this, though success also depends on other factors such as creativity, experience, knowledge, resources, and the concept we are addressing today: the Buyer Persona — a profile capable of providing us with truly useful and valuable information.

To stand out from the competition, offering quality at a good price is no longer enough; customers now look for affinity with the brand, wanting to find what they need while also establishing a personal connection with the company offering it. Hence the importance of understanding and reaching people's emotions, of working meticulously on what we sell, defining a clear message, and taking advantage of the need that motivates and drives the user to make the purchase.

But how do we achieve all this? How can we obtain that information and use it to persuade, appeal, and attract? Starting from the premise that we understand selling requires persuasion, we will obtain the data through the ideal buyer profile — a model person, realistic, composed of all the parameters that make our product the perfect choice: the Buyer Persona.

What is the Buyer Persona?

Although this term is increasingly well known and applied in today's online marketing, many were already profiling it in the physical world years ago. The Buyer Persona is a detailed archetype of what we consider the ideal customer. As you can imagine, this profile varies depending on the product or service we offer, the environment in which we offer it, its cost, and many more variables that will influence its characteristics and preferences.

Also known as the ideal customer, the Buyer Persona not only allows us to get closer to the perfect buyer but also provides very useful information when it comes to understanding where and how they seek to meet their needs. For a business, having this data will greatly help focus marketing resources and strategies on offering solutions that satisfy those needs the customer requires.

The Buyer Persona means we are no longer satisfied with simply offering a good product at a good price and waiting to persuade; now we have the means and information to know where and how to present a solution. Instead of waiting for the customer to choose us, we go looking for them, knock on their door, and offer the best way to meet all their needs.

Defining the ideal customer for your digital business

When creating this prototype of the perfect customer, we must not only focus on the product or service we sell, but also define a segmentation system that allows us to characterize them as a real and useful person for our purpose — which is none other than achieving conversion and building loyalty. These are some of the key points, or targets, when defining the Buyer Persona:

• Online behavior. We need to know how our potential customer browses and what interests them. Knowing where they look for information and what catches their attention will allow us to establish our position online, making it easy for them to find us when they look for what they need.

• Environment. If the buyer we are targeting is a complex, educated profile who operates in high-income environments, we can determine that being present on second-hand platforms, low-cost sites, or discount pages will not be a priority, nor will we need to worry about lowering the price of what we sell. And the same applies in reverse.

• Location. The ideal Buyer Persona is also a figure that requires us to know their location, as we can focus our campaigns more precisely if we know where they are and in what environment they move. If we are going to sell golf accessories, we will find that our market largely comes from high-income residential areas.

These targets need to be supplemented by other factors such as age, financial situation, or hobbies, as these are pieces of data that make it much easier to define the Buyer Persona as a perfect and ideal customer prototype for our goals. By mastering all these key factors, we will see that the result becomes a powerful sales tool capable of reaching the customer, seducing them, and building loyalty.

Types of Buyer Persona

Once we are able to sketch out the main traits of the Buyer Persona, we will see that we should not limit ourselves to defining it based solely on the figure of the final buyer, as there are more types that are equally involved in the purchase process.

• Decision-maker profile. This is a type of person focused on materializing the final conversion into a purchase — the most common profile. The user receives information under the best conditions so that they are attracted by the need to make the purchase and satisfy their need. Although not the only type, it is the most well-known and developed Buyer Persona prototype.

• Prescriber profile. This person does not need to buy the product you sell, as their function is limited directly to recommendations, so they have no personal relationship with it either. Just as a doctor recommends a medication, it is the patients who go to the store and pay at the checkout. Do you see the difference?

• Influencer profile. And, between the two types of Buyer Persona defined above, we find the influencer profile. We are talking about a type of person capable of spreading the word about our products across channels, like the influencers we all know. Their opinion and following can be crucial for spreading the message we want, and their collaboration with our brand is an increasingly interesting asset.

Why is the Buyer Persona important in conversion strategies?

For an online business and its conversion strategy, whether large, medium, or small, creating a Buyer Persona can largely determine success in achieving our goals. First of all, we need to understand that creating and customizing it allows the digital business to have realistic data about the audience it will be working with. This quality greatly facilitates the achievement of objectives. This is deeply linked to Behavioral Economics, as we have discussed previously on our blog.

Adapting the content we show and focusing it on covering the potential customer's needs is one of the most important and complex priorities. Our brand can now increase its sales possibilities thanks to the information provided by these highly detailed profiles. The result will be the desired differentiation, ensuring that our product stands out from the competition.

• We know the sector we work in better.

• We define in detail the type of buyers we want to attract.

• We improve and personalize communication areas and channels by knowing the user.

• We offer a product or service tailored to what the market truly wants.

Knowing aspects such as the brand-customer relationship, navigability and interaction with the page, or the priority the potential buyer places on a particular aspect of the product they want to buy, will allow us to focus our resources and means to shape a fully optimized conversion strategy alongside expert data analysts. This translates into a higher return on investment and greater profit.