Buyer Personas
"A buyer persona is essentially the representative of a type of customer that you identify as having either a specific interest in your organization or your products, or a market problem that your products or services can solve"
David Meerman Scott, The new rules of marketing and PR
Customer segmentation is certainly the first step, and the fundamental one, to understand the needs of travelers and the type of customers with which the company interacts.
But you can decide, on a marketing level, to go into even more detail and develop Buyer Personas.
BUYER PERSONAS AND SEGMENTATION
Customer segmentation in fact works on general behaviors and characteristics and usually translates into a limited number of segments that include large groups of customers.
Buyer personas, on the other hand, provide a more in-depth understanding of individual customers within a segment since they take into consideration, in addition to demographic data, also behavior and therefore motivations, preferences and personal experiences.
DIFFERENT PURPOSES
Segmentation serves to set a company strategy based on certain and consistent data regarding its customers. In fact, it is primarily used for strategic decision making, such as targeting marketing efforts, allocating resources, or identifying high-value customer segments. Buyer personas, on the other hand, drive the tactical execution of the marketing sector. They are primarily used for product development and customer service, to personalize your efforts and engage with customers in a more targeted and relevant way.
Segmentation
quantitative data
“what” to propose
Buyer personas
qualitative data
“how” to propose
HOW TO CREATE BUYER PERSONAS
The first phase is certainly the collection of data for the construction of customer representations. The data is of various types:
SOCIO-DEMOGRAPHIC DATA
Age, sex, origin, level of education, type of occupation, income, marital status, family unit. This data gives a face and an identity to the buyer persona, it is also recommended to “humanise” them as much as possible by giving them a name, for example Enzo, 37 years old, freelancer, married with a child. This helps to make the image of a specific target group more concrete and allows professionals to target a service/product in a less abstract way.
PSYCHOGRAPHIC DATA
Character traits, value system, anxieties, fears, expectations, beliefs, habits and lifestyles, hobbies. Having this data means knowing how customers choose one service rather than another, how they solve problems, how they get information, etc. This allows the company to make economic investment choices or communication choices for a certain service.
Obviously, you need to know how to select the relevant data based on the company’s objectives, remembering that the buyer persona is a tool and as such must be built based on the specificities and needs of those who use it. Depending on the reason for identifying buyer personas, the information collection process changes
How is this data collected?
The channels for data collection are obviously multiple, ranging from social media, to Google analytics, to the CRM database but also to market research, questionnaires and interviews.
In general, a good marketing campaign does not develop more than 2/3 buyer personas
You can find several free online templates to build your buyer personas such as, for example, semrush.com or hubspot.com
An example of a buyer persona for the tourism sector
