The topic of buyer personas is popping up left and right lately as businesses look for new and more effective ways to communicate with their customers and prospects. While they’re more popular than ever, some may still be asking, “what is a buyer persona?” and, “why should I care?”
What is a Buyer Persona?
It’s easy to find an array of answers to these questions, though most aren’t particularly enlightening. We at Actionable Research believe that the definition should be descriptive enough to both know how to recognize one when you see it, and also simple enough to understand their utility.
One of the fathers of persona development, Tony Zambito, defines personas as, “research-based archetypal representations of who buyers are, what they are trying to accomplish, what goals drive their behavior, how they think, how they buy, and why they make buying decisions.” Since solidifying his original description of a persona in 2003, he has also included, “where they are buying and when they are buying.” We like this definition for many reasons, chiefly because it demands a more scientific approach to developing personas than relying on knowledge that is unspoken, but often accepted as truth in the office, or utilizing segmentations that don’t truly define personas.
Personas may be based on differences in demographics, firmographics, buying behaviors, customer journey and/or many other attributes. If developed scientifically and backed by both quantitative and qualitative research, a company’s personas can be used across all of its departments. Overall, personas provide a summarized glimpse into groups of customers or potential customers for your business.
What Isn’t a Buyer Persona?
When you think about breaking your customer base into groups, you may be tempted to think that persona development is merely a segmentation exercise. Let’s be clear; while developing a proper segmentation of your customers and prospects is a key step in persona development, your market segments are not your buyer personas.
Segmentation breaks your customer base into groups based on things like attitudes, needs or behaviors. Personas offer a different kind of breakdown. The main difference between the two is that personas encompass additional in-depth information about customers and their journey to making their decisions on products like yours. One useful way to consider these differences: segmentations are based on one specific criteria and represent a large group of your customer base, and personas are three to four representations of many aspects of customer groups.
Buyer Personas Are For Everyone
Whether your company is B2B or B2C, buyer personas can be used to help focus your team’s messages and marketing mix and methods. Not only does it help the marketing department make choices about content and the mediums they use to reach the customer base, it can help the sales department make decisions about their sales approaches.
Research Based
A very important part of Zambito’s definition that can be easily overlooked are the words “research-based.” This is such an important phrase because it highlights the need to base the customer information you use to develop buyer personas on solid science, on research. To learn more about how research influences the persona development process, subscribe to our blog and receive updates on our developing persona development series.
