Nestor Gizrel Ong

How To Use Buyer Personas To Understand Your Audience

The first step to achieving an effective marketing campaign is to understand your audience. This is the foundation of all successful businesses. Most businesses get caught in the trap of failing to capture the attention of their target audience because they failed to craft an accurate buyer persona – something you should be wary of.

This is why this article was written – we want to guide you on crafting an accurate buyer persona so you can better understand your audience and launch a better marketing campaign.

Before anything else, let us break down a few basic concepts for everyone unfamiliar with business terms.

1. What is a buyer persona?
2. What is a target audience?
3. What is a marketing channel?

Buyer Persona

Buyer persona is a term used to refer to “who” a company is selling its products and services for. It includes their location, age, income (purchasing power), job titles, or even your customers’ goals, challenges, interests, and priorities.

The buyer persona is the closest approximation of the commonalities of all your potential and actual customers. Knowing your buyer persona will help you craft a better strategy to better position yourself so you can market your business to your target market more effectively.

An example of a buyer persona would be “female, white, 20-25, with at least $10,000 yearly income, and does the purchasing for the family” Of course, the more specific the better. Some tools can help you gather data from multiple sources to craft an accurate buyer persona.

Target Audience

Target audience is the group of people whom your advertising campaign is aimed at. Prior to the establishment of the business, one important question that business owners should ask is “to whom are my products and services for?” An automobile company can have its target audience described as “a middle-aged man with $100k a year income a year.” Or a mobile phone company aiming their products at “millennials that love photography.” It can be as general or as specific as the company likes it to be.

The difference between the target audience and the buyer persona is that the former is intentional and deliberately set by the business while the latter is the result of any intentional or unintentional marketing outcome. Meaning, your business may set “a middle-aged man with $100k a year income” as your target audience but may (as an unintended result) have a large customer base composed of “people in their twenties with $50k a year income” which becomes your buyer persona.

Knowing the difference will help you adjust your marketing campaign and tailor it to cater to your actual buyer persona rather than your target audience or vice versa.

Marketing channel

Now you may be asking why marketing channels are included here – what is its relevance to this article and why you have to learn about it. Well, knowing about marketing channels is extremely important when it comes to launching an effective marketing campaign.

Marketing channels are ways to get your products and/or services to your target audience. In a traditional marketing sense, the marketing channel is anything and anyone involved in transferring the goods from the production site to the consumption site– like how your fruits and vegetables were moved from the farm where they were grown to your table.

Understanding where to create an effective marketing channel and which channel to focus on is crucial after crafting your buyer persona because some buyers respond to a channel more than the others. Focusing on this channel will help your business achieve efficiency.

Now that you are familiar with these concepts, let us discuss how you can use your buyer persona to better understand your audience and launch an effective marketing campaign.

Using buyer persona to understand your audience

Knowing your buyer persona will help you better understand your audience and the effectiveness of your campaigns. The buyer persona that you have crafted through gathering data will help you answer the question “have I correctly targeted the audience that I want to target?” If not, “should I change my target audience into the buyer persona that my business has identified?” These are the questions that you need to ask to craft an effective marketing plan.

If you ignore these, your marketing plan may be ineffective or inefficient and you may risk losing your current buyers when your marketing plan (like promotional activities, for example) does not cater to their interests.

Running a successful marketing plan based on the buyer persona

After identifying your buyer persona, you may want to do the following to keep your buyers engaged:

1. Know your goals and identify the best tool to achieve this goal

Go back to the basics and identify your goal. Do you want to stick to your previous goal or do you want to change it? Knowing your goals allow you to decide whether or not to keep on moving forward with the buyer persona that you have just identified.

After answering this, take notice of the tools at your disposal. Tech companies spend time creating software products to make business processes more efficient and less costly. Knowing the best tool that you can use to achieve your goals will not only fast-track your way to success but will also help you save more time, energy, and resources.

2. Learn from your mistakes

It sounds cliche but successful companies right now will vouch for this. Analyzing the mistakes you have committed in the past allows you to plan ahead and make a few tweaks to ensure smooth sailing. Businesses have to gather data from previous campaigns and analyze which activity contributed to which data.

For example, if you have run in the past a social media campaign about your brand (for brand awareness) and the engagement is low, then you have to run through the data you have collected. Did you publish your posts on a weekday? What were the target demographics for your ads? Getting this data is essential in analyzing and interpreting how successful your campaign is. And you can use this data to make a few changes to your future marketing campaigns.

3. Be SMART and launch the campaign with what you have

SMART is a classic business concept – and it often refers to goals. SMART means Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound (some articles differ in words). Your plan should be specific. It should ask the 5Ws (Who, What, Where, When, Why) and you should be able to clearly and unambiguously define and answer these questions.

Your plan should also be measurable. You should know your criteria to track your progress or determine whether you have successfully launched your campaign. It should be attainable. You should know your resources are enough for you to launch the plan (and even ask if others have done it before). It should be realistic. Do you have enough time and resources to actualize the plan? Can you commit to achieving this goal? And your plan should also be time-bound. Set a deadline on when you want to launch your plan and until when.

Conclusion

Understanding the difference between your target audience and your buyer persona will help you ask important questions as your business goes by. Not everything will go your way and the mark of a successful business is knowing how to adapt to a changing business environment.