What is a customer buyer persona or archetype

It’s a widely employed exercise in market research to determine whom to target, how to approach them, and how to connect with your niche or intended audience.

Creating a customer archetype can set you apart from your competitors, especially if applied successfully to the design of marketing campaigns and the ongoing automation of your product or service.

If you need assistance in designing customer archetypes for your company, Dazzet is here to help.

¿What is a customer archetype?

A customer archetype, or buyer persona, is a semi-fictional character construction (or one based on a real person) representing your ideal customers.

These archetypes encompass sociodemographic data such as age, gender, location, customs, cultural and work environments, educational level, and more.

But there’s more!

It’s also crucial to have a psychological and personality profile, encompassing qualities, behaviors, habits, preferences, desires, needs, etc.

All this information is vital to better understand your market and thus direct your advertising campaigns more effectively, reaching more leads or potential customers—people who are genuinely interested in your product or service.

When designing buyer personas, it’s important to consider both the marketing objectives of the company and those of each product or service, making the marketing strategy design process more human and personalized towards the audience you aim to attract.

Why is the customer archetype important?

Having a customer archetype is fundamental to all inbound marketing strategies, as it focuses on people, their goals, and needs.

It provides insights for developing more engaging content that can emotionally and intellectually connect with the motivations of users and current customers.

It also makes market research easier, allowing you to better understand your audience.

A company can design multiple buyer personas or customer archetypes for the same product or service, as long as these help adequately segment the target population, thus facilitating the entire sales process.

It’s an essential factor in recognizing their needs and desires and how your brand can satisfy them.

How to Use Customer Archetypes

The process of building a buyer persona is enlightening in itself.

To create a customer archetype, you first need to ask detailed questions about your ideal customers. This exercise will help you notice things you hadn’t seen before.

You can then compare your answers with those of your colleagues, uncovering any inconsistencies in your perspectives and fostering discussions to resolve them.

One immediate benefit of a customer archetype is that it helps you gain insights about customers and align departments. This ensures that marketing, sales, product development, and customer service all share the same vision of the ideal customer.

You can then use your personas to guide the direction of your work. For instance:

• Product development can use buyer personas for product roadmaps. Customer archetypes help identify and prioritize changes in your offering based on what your customers need most.
• Marketing can use buyer personas to build effective strategies. In content marketing strategies, for example, archetypes are critical. They help focus keyword research efforts and serve as a reference when drafting copy. They can also assist in identifying and prioritizing promotional activities.
• Buyer personas can also help the sales team establish relationships with potential customers. By understanding what the prospect is facing and coming prepared to address their concerns, the sales team will be much more effective.
• Finally, customer service teams can use buyer personas to better serve their customers. Being trained on the issues customers are trying to solve with your product, and the frustration it causes when things don’t work, your support team can show more empathy. A little compassion can go a long way in dealing with an upset customer.

¿Is it Relevant for a Small Business to Build Archetypes?

It’s easy to see why buyer personas are important for businesses with several employees and departments, but if you’re a solopreneur or a very small company, you might still wonder why you should bother. After all, you know who your customers are, wouldn’t this be a huge waste of time?

Actually, it wouldn’t be.

For instance, let’s say you’re a freelance personal trainer. You have a website and a blog where you share fitness tips and tricks. Obviously, you want to attract clients interested in hiring a personal trainer. A buyer persona will help focus your attention.

You might discover that most of your clients are first-time mothers in their 30s. Assuming this is a market you’d like to continue serving, you can now adjust the content of your website and blog to target this specific niche. This will make writing copy for your website and selecting blog topics that resonate with your target audience easier.

How to Build a Customer buyer persona

Here’s a basic guide to start building your customer archetype or buyer persona.

1. Research Your Audience in Depth

Your buyer persona or customer archetype should be based on real people, not just instincts or what you think might work.

As mentioned earlier, include all sociodemographic data, as well as interests, tastes, and other psychological elements.

You can gather this information from:

• Social media analysis, especially Facebook, can offer interesting insights into the behavior of your ideal customers.
• Your customer database.
• Google Analytics.
• Research your competitors and their customers.
• Understand which networks and channels your customers use.
• Regularly track hashtags, Facebook groups, forums, etc.

2. Understand Your Customers’ Pain Points

To identify the needs and expectations of your customers and the added value your brand or product will bring to their lives, it’s important to track the problems or annoyances your customer wants to solve.

What barriers do they face in reaching their goals? What prevents them from being successful? What do they need to make their lives better?

You can obtain this information by participating in conversations and sentiment analysis in both digital and offline worlds.

Set up search flows to track mentions of your brand or competitors, read what customers and leads say about the satisfaction products in your market niche provide.

Understand why they fall in love with your brand or others, or which parts of the customer experience don’t work.

3. Know Your Customers’ Goals

This is the flip side of the previous point, a much more optimistic version of what they want.

Their expectations, goals, and objectives might be personal or professional, and this analysis is based on the product or services you sell.

Your customers’ goals are important, even if they don’t directly relate to what your product offers them, because it’s not about matching customers or fitting them into your brand.

Rather, it’s about knowing your target audience more deeply!

4. Understand How You Can Help

Now that you have an outline with all the information gathered in the previous steps, analyze this information to understand how your products or services can help your target.

Ideally, you should typify the characteristics of your products from the customers’ perspective, which is what your product does or is.

On the other hand, identify the real benefits, which is how the product facilitates or improves your customers’ lives.

5. Build Your Customer Archetype

Now you have a wealth of information collected and analyzed!

It’s time to construct your customer archetype with all these data. Give your persona a name, define their job, and outline their characteristics.

Remember, the archetype should be as close to a real human being as possible. So, if you need to build several customer archetypes, that’s also valid if the information you’ve gathered doesn’t fit into a single person’s profile.

To build your archetype, start by asking yourself the following questions:

¿Who is the customer?

• Name: Give a name to this person.
• What are their sociodemographic characteristics?
  • Age
  • Gender
  • Residential location
  • Type of job
  • Education
  • Family nucleus
• Other identifiers like communication preference: for instance, if they use social media, or only read emails
• Purchase preferences: (whether they shop online, prefer a physical store, etc.)

¿What?

• Here, you can identify what the goals of this person are.
• Challenges and struggles they have in life.
• Are they lacking something?
• Do they need to solve specific problems?
• What should you do to help them achieve their goals or overcome their needs and satisfy their desires.

¿Why?

• Include in your customer archetype actual quotes or verbatims that customers have said about your service or product, their needs, and goals.
• Why they buy from you
• Why they don’t buy from you
• Why they buy from the competition
• Why they don’t buy from the competition

¿How?

• Here, you’ll construct messages and select channels through which that person will best receive information about the solution you offer.
• Message one
• Message two
• Communication channels: mass media, digital, or personalized…
• Distribution channels: large retailers, neighborhood stores, digital…
• Write an appealing sales pitch that reaches the hearts of leads.

You can also find free templates on HubSpot that guide you through key questions in designing your personas. You can see them by clicking on this link.

Other platforms that offer these kinds of tools include:

• Cyberclick
• Xtesio
• Kayak Marketing

You can also base your archetypes on what your sales team has observed when interacting with customers. Knowing the type of questions customers ask, what they comment on when calling for a quote, etc., can help identify behavior patterns.

Currently, platforms like Facebook or Instagram facilitate segmentation, providing optional parameters to ensure ads reach an appropriate audience with specific characteristics. So, don’t hesitate to have your customer archetype to clearly define the segment your ads will target.