Buyer Persona: What is it?

Buyer Persona is the most important content marketing foundation. Only those who know their Buyer Personas can produce specific content with added value, generate leads

and ultimately win customers. In another blog post, I explained what content marketing is. But before you start producing content, you need to develop your buyer personas.

But what is a buyer persona actually?

Definition of Buyer Persona

A Buyer Persona is a semi-fictional person who represents your ideal client. Buyer personas are developed based on real analytical data. These include:

• Information about the company

• Role in the company

• responsibilities

• needs

• Goals (personal and professional)

• motivations

• challenges

• Pain points

• patterns of action

• etc.

The more specific you can develop the image of your Buyer Persona, the better!

Often companies still think in terms of target groups. Similar characteristics or needs act as characteristics for the group of potential customers. However, this model often does not

work anymore. Just ask your sales representative. Incidentally, salespeople are also an important source in the creation of buyer personas. After all, they have "the ear on the market" and know best what questions interest buyers along the Buyer's Journey.

The goal of inbound marketing is for potential customers to find your business and come to you. For this to work, you need to know what your customers are doing, interested in or even what problems and challenges they have. These questions will help you in the first place to create accurate content.

However, to be found by your customers, you need to know where and how your potential customers are looking for information, what channels they use, and what linguistic expressions (keywords!) Are used.

Creation of the Buyer Persona model

The Persona model was invented by Alan Cooper in 1983. At that time he worked on a computer program for project management. Already at the beginning of his work, he

interviewed potential users whose work he wanted to facilitate through the program. One of these was Kathy, who worked for "Carlick Advertising" and whose main task was described as "Traffic". Kathy's responsibility was to fill projects and to ensure a correspondingly even workload of the employees. A typical Project Management job, Kathy became the first Persona - "Kathy Traffic".

In his mind Alan Cooper simulated certain role-playing games. One of these role-plays was based on Kathy. Therefore, Alan played a project manager and questioned the functions

and behaviours of his program from the point of view of a project manager.

Through this remarkable role-playing technique, Alan Cooper found a way to differentiate between design issues, functionality, and interaction. His eyes focused on the essentials, from the point of view of a project manager. In this way, he realized what was necessary and what was superfluous or which functions were often used and which were not. Cooper used this method from then on for all his work. Since the focus was on the user of the program and its specific challenges right at the beginning of the development process, the product could be adapted to the corresponding challenges during development.

Targeted Marketing by Buyer Personas

The concept of Buyer Personas allows companies to position themselves where their customers are. After all, the customer will not come to you on his own, but you have to be

where your customers are and where they make themselves felt.

The creation of Buyer Personas is unavoidable if you want to find out which information channels and sources your potential customers use. For this purpose, it is not enough to assemble a common intersection of selected properties with target groups. You need to get to know and define your buyer personas as concretely as possible.

Only in this way, as a marketer, do you understand what makes your customers tick, how and why they make purchasing decisions. This information will help you to tailor your marketing campaigns. Creating Buyer Personas at the beginning may be costly, but it will help you achieve your business goals in the long run while also saving you resources.

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Just as Alan Cooper involved "Kathy Traffic" in developing his project management program, you need to think and act on your products, services, and especially

content creation, from the perspective of your customers. Buyer Personas help you understand and get to know your potential customers. Only those who know what motivates their customers can help them to solve their challenges.