by admin - 18 Jun 2021

If you’re into business, before you begin marketing your product and selling it, you have to figure out whom to sell them. You cannot market/advertise your product to anyone randomly, after all, marketing and advertising costs a big sum. To save your budget and bring good ROI, you need to figure out who could be your audience and who is most likely to buy your product. While drawing out the ideal target audience, you might be confused between the two terms ‘target audience’ and ‘buyer persona’. Though these two terms sound similar, there is a clear thin-line difference between the two that brings a significant impact to your business. A detailed guide on how buyer persona is different from your target audience and how to amp up your marketing strategy with these two is shared below.

 
 
What Are Target Audiences?

You would indeed try to reach a maximum of people, but at the same time, you cannot afford to waste your hard-earned money in marketing to people who are not interested in your product/service. Every businessperson would want a good return on every penny they spend, and for that, marketing to your target audiences can be beneficial.

Target audiences or your target market comprises a broad group of people whom you showcase your product, assuming they are interested in your business and would potentially increase your conversion rate. Creating target markets is preferred for B2C business where the interaction is directly with the consumers. Target audiences are drafted based on demographic and psychographic data as follows.
Demographic data includes details like age, gender, nationality, physical location, etc.
Psychographic details include personality, values, interests, etc.

With the help of the above details, you can target your marketing and sales campaigns only to people who fall in the bracket of your desired target market. For example, assume you take yoga classes for adolescent women in your city. You would like to target only women living in your city, say Mumbai and in the age group of 25-40 and interested in yoga and fitness. So, by niching down to these demographic details, you can market your classes only to the people who fall in these demographics. This attempt will cost you less in running ads on digital media and bring better leads and conversions, thus saving your money and time.

 
 
What Is A Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. While crafting the buyer persona, you must position yourself in the boots of your customer and think how he/she will react and decide. You must carefully map every step of a buyer’s journey and understand consumer psychology. You must try to comprehend your ideal customer’s daily routine, the challenges they face and how they make decisions. You must try to solve their challenges with your product/service. If we consider the same yoga classes example, to craft your buyer persona, you must zoom in on a few more details apart from the ones included in the target market analysis like

• What is the regular schedule of the person?

• What are their fitness goals?

• What other activities interest them?

• What challenges are they facing to attend yoga classes?

• Do they prefer online/offline classes?

• How much money can they spend on yoga?

When you answer these questions, you will be able to customize your business/classes catering to the needs of your ideal customer. And when you cater to customer’s interest, they will come to you and stay with you.

 
 
Differences Between Target Audience Vs Buyer Persona

• Defining the target market and drafting buyer persona are intended towards increasing sales and generating increased ROI for your marketing efforts. However, both the techniques differ from each other as the target audience cater mostly to B2C businesses while buyer persona can be useful for B2B sales as well.

• While your target market is a wider group of audience who can be interested in your product/service, buyer persona requires you to zoom in on the fictional representation of your deal customer itself.

• The target market is selecting and grouping people based on demographic and psychographic characteristics. To draft a buyer persona, you must empathize with your ideal customer, track the buyer journey and their thought process to cater them with the most favourable experiences.

• For your target market, you can draft several different buyer personas and customize your marketing messages accordingly to suit the interests of the corresponding buyer.

• Target market or target audience is sorted based on demographic details and analyzing your competitor’s consumer base. For drafting your buyer persona, you do not have to depend on your competitors. Instead, use your previous customer experiences and reviews to think about how to grow your customer base.

• For instance, assume you sell local handmade crafts, your target market will include people of the location you ship your crafts and the people who are interested in handmade crafts or who have searched for handmade crafts or made one such purchase in the past. Your buyer persona will deep dive into more details like which social media platform/online marketplace will handmade craft buyers explore the most; how much will the person spend on buying handmade crafts so that you adjust your pricing; what products are they most interested in, etc.

 
 
Significance Of Buyer Personas in Business

• Once you have drafted your buyer persona, how are you going to use it for your business? It’s not only a random ritual for any business, but you must apply it in every stage of your business to facilitate a smooth transition of visitors to customers.

• Buyer personas must be applied right from your website’s UI/UX to your email subjects and messages, your social media content, social media promotions, search engine marketing campaigns and your content calendar.

• With the drafted persona, you can customize the experiences at every touchpoint of your consumer, like initially market/promote your product on the platforms your ideal customer would be present on for the awareness stage. In the consideration stage, display the products they might be more interested in, and in the decision stage, adjust product prices to their budget. This will render smooth conversions of your funnel.

• While people might think that drafting a buyer persona is a difficult task; they fail to realize that a properly constructed buyer persona can provide content ideas and guide you with devising marketing plans.

• With A/B testing of different buyer personas, you can also pinpoint the content gap and other faults in your marketing efforts while also rectifying them at the earliest.

• Consumers feel their importance and establish a strong connection with your business, having served with what they prefer rather than being bombarded with random ads, products and experiences.

 
 
Can Target Audiences Be Replaced with Buyer Personas?

When you read that buyer personas give you a better idea of your consumer and bring lucrative benefits to your business, you might argue that why should we plan a target market when we can draft a buyer persona. If you’re thinking the same, let’s clarify that target audience and buyer persona are neither interchangeable nor can be compromised for each other.
Your target audience gives you a bigger picture of your market and makes it easy to niche down to your ideal buyer/consumer. Just relate it to the fact that searching for someone among a group of 100 is easier than searching for the same person among the group of 1000.

The baseline of the argument is that the target audience and buyer persona are both equally important and relevant for your business. These are the primitive steps that guide you on how to expand and grow your consumer base. Application of these two strategies not only get you a better return on paid ads, but also improve your organic traffic. If you wish to create a target audience and buyer persona for your business/brand, connect with Entitledarts We help our clients with the 360-degree digital transformation of their business and amp up their marketing strategies.

 
 
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