Buyer personas: Indispensable for effective marketing

Buyer personas for an in-depth understanding of customers
Personas are an extended definition of target group segments that go far beyond demographic and socio-demographic characteristics. Rather, they are fictitious people with a concrete face and their own stories that represent a customer type and make it tangible. They are based on existing customer data as well as market research data and describe the needs, wishes, motivations as well as the information and purchasing behavior of consumers, so that employees of a company across all departments - from product management and marketing to sales and customer service - quickly gain a common understanding of their customers without first having to read several pages of documentation and studies.

Significant increase in marketing effectiveness on several levels
If personas become part of the day-to-day work of marketing teams, they help to develop a deeper empathy for the target group and thus design marketing measures that are more relevant in terms of concept, messages and visual design and therefore also deliver better performance in terms of KPIs. At the same time, they allow a customer-centric mindset to be anchored in the company. In digital marketing in particular, personas can be used to model different individual customer journeys so that consumers are guided through the purchasing process in a targeted manner with the right impulses for anticipated obstacles and a suitable brand experience, thereby significantly increasing the likelihood of a purchase. At the same time, companies can create brand experiences that are more meaningful, relevant and appropriate, helping to actively shape brand perception.

Process and success factors for creating effective personas
Personas can be created in five simple steps, but the following success factors are essential for them to develop their full potential in the company:

• Representation of real people. Qualitative research is often omitted for reasons of time and cost. However, without these genuine, meaningful and fact-based insights, not only is the customer-centric perspective lost, but the result will be one-dimensional at best and completely misleading at worst.

• Validation and refinement. While qualitative interviews or focus groups already provide a valuable basis that is usually sufficient for the implementation of smaller projects, it is advisable to validate the persona data with quantitative research for company-wide implementation. At the same time, the study can be used to enrich the personas with further valuable demographic data and media usage statistics.

• Promote the use of personas. For personas to deliver the desired results, they must be integrated into key process steps and used for decision-making. To promote this, it is important to design them in such a way that they can be experienced simply, clearly and visually quickly. On the one hand, this refers to the design of the persona itself, but also to the way in which it can be integrated into everyday working life in an easily accessible way, e.g. as posters, cards, videos, PowerPoint slides or interactively on a small internal website.