Short answer: Buyer persona and Retarget Marketing

I. Revise the concept of Buyer persona

What does Buyer persona actually mean?

Imagine you have a fantastic business idea, and you are all-in to implement it. Yet, only one big question reamains: What is the best way to describe your set of target customers?

The answer is simply two words: Buyer persona

Basically, Buyer persona is a fictional profile which represents a typically ideal customer of a company. In other words, Buyer persona is a person who does not exist, but a company can rely on that model to adjust and improve its products, so that the product can be optimally curated for as many customers as possible.

Why do companies use Buyer persona?

As Buyer persona represents an ideal customer of a company, the firm can utilize Buyer persona to construct its marketing plan. That virtual profile can pinpoint, for example, the purchasing behavior of target customers, and the productive distribution channels, thereby companies can modify their logistics scheme for better efficiency.

In addition, Buyer persona can help improve features of products as well. By analyzing customers’ preference for a product and using relevant data to build up Buyer persona, a company can gain insights about current strengths and weaknesses of its products. As a result, the firm has a better guidance for further product development.

Types of Buyer persona and examples

There are two types of Buyer persona: B2C and B2B.

In short, B2C refers to the business model aiming at individual consumers, who have a need of purchasing a product. On the other hand, B2B refers to the business model aiming at people who are responsible for purchasing decisions for a company.

Here are two examples to help you distinguish the two types of Buyer persona:

Example 1: B2C – Buyer persona for a fast fashion brand: Amy – a young female professional

Personal background:

• Age: 25
• Location: NYC
• Income: $65,000/year before taxes
• Occupation: accountant for a cooperate
• Marital status: single

Financial behavior:

• Can spend up to $500/month for clothes
• Prefered payment method: credit card
• Willing to spend over the budget for self-care purchases

Brand preference:

• A loyal customer of fast-fashion brands such as Zara, Mango, and H&M
• Pursues an active and healthy lifestyle
• An avid fan of cosmetic products

Interests:

• Trendy and affordable outfits to work and to go out
• Excellent customer services with great fashion advice
• Spacious fitting rooms
• Flexible return policies for products
• Attend beauty and fitness classes

Life goals:

• Save $1million by the age of 40
• Have a happy family with 2 kids and a dog in NYC
• Stay fit
• Retire at the age of 45 and become a fashion blogger

Services used:

• Public transportation
• Internet
• Mobile and home phones
• Delivery

With this Buyer persona, a fast-fashion startup can use the statistics to launch lines of clothes which match customers’ interests, budgets, and the self-images they want to demonstrate.

Example 2: B2B – Buyer persona for an edutech center: LearnFast Assume this company needs to purchase Linked Booster to maximize its recruitment process of hiring English and Math teachers:

• Demographic sector: women aged from 35-45
• Type of company: English and math teaching company, with both offline and online classes, 5 offices, around 50 employees
• Client profile: K-12 students in NYC, particularly who need private tutors to prepare for standardized tests such as SAT, ACT, etc.
• Work areas: Human Resources and administrative.
• Academic degree: College degrees in Psychology andEnglish Literature
• Position in the company: Head of Human Resources department
• Technical skills: Excel, Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, Photoshop.
• Responsibilities: managing the work flow in the HR department, working directly with the Director, interviewing applicants for teacher positions.
• Subordinates: staffing coordinators, staffing specialists, HR assistants, HR specialists.
• Working at areas: metropolitan
• Annual revenue: $1.5million before taxes
• Current objective: optimize the recruitment process and hire more talented teachers
• Problem being faced: Lack high-qualified teachers to meet the demand, and the data managing system is slow. Therefore, she needs to find a solution to both spread out the job ads more extensively and boost the process pace for data.
• Consumption patterns: She is tech-savvy and would like to purchase an automation tool that can help her solve the two problems simultaneously.
• Preferred means of communication: Email, phone.

Via the B2B example, we can see that this profile requires more information than the B2C model does. It needs not only the company information but also the profile of the purchaser.

If you would like a more extensive revision of Buyer persona and its examples, go visit Our Blog Post on this topic.

II. Buyer persona and other marketing strategies

Retarget marketing

What is retarget marketing?

Have you ever tried to look up on Google for a product you want to buy, let’s say, a Cartier watch, and later, when you open Facebook, your newsfeed is full of luxury watch ads? Or you search for a course in Computer Science on Coursera, and later you see ads about Coursera on the sidebars of your Facebook newsfeed as well?

That is a typical example of retarget marketing.

To put it simple, retarget marketing, or remarketing, happens when people visit a website X, and they are “cookied”, which means the website X tracks their web browsing activities, follow them to whatever other websites they enter, and display the ads of X.

So, back to the two aforementioned examples, we can say that both Cartier and Coursera retargeted their web visitors, by putting a cookie on visitors’ computers and following them all over the Internet.

Example 1: Retarget specific URL visits

For example, you are a fan of the luxury jewelry brand Pandora, and you are particularly interested in buying a new Pandora bracelet as a treat for yourself after months of working hard. You spend more time browsing over the Jewelry section than over the Necklaces or Rings or Earrings section. Later, you see that there is a specific ad about Pandora bracelets on your Facebook’s newsfeed.

What a coincidence, right?

The truth is that Pandora puts cookies on your computer, and they see that you are most interested in their bracelets, based on the amount of time spent.

This is an example of how to do retarget marketing with specific URL visits. The strategy is really helpful when you want to boost the conversion rate.

Who doesn’t want that, correct? 🙂

Example 2: Retargeting marketing existing customers

This retargeting strategy is effective when you want to retarget your website’s subscribers, who have become unresponsive after a while. It also works for existing customers who bought your products but have not made any orders on your website recently.

Why do you need this marketing method? Because you may want to introduce them to new products or evoke their shopping yearnings back, and it does not hurt to promote your products to existing customers. There is a high chance that they will be active back 🙂

For example, I subscribed to The Economist for one year. When my subscription was about to expire, the newspaper put an ad on my Facebook’s newsfeed reminding me to renew my annual subscription with a very goof price of only $12 for three months!

Does retarget marketing violate privacy laws?

Now, you know what retarget marketing is. A natural follow-up question can be: “ Is retarget marketing against privacy laws, like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), or California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)?”

The answer is No. As long as websites abide by laws protecting users’ control over their personal information.

Buyer persona and Retarget marketing

Besides the popular impacts of converting customers and making them actually buy your products, there is a less well-known benefit from remarketing. That is improving the construction of the Buyer persona, thereby a company can better navigate the customer set and modify its products to fit clients’ needs.

When retarget marketing is applied, companies can gain insights about customers’ needs and the favorite and popular products among a specific group, thus they can alter features of products and boost the sales. In addition, they can model various Buyer personas to match with more specific categorized groups of consumers.

For example, A is a cosmetic brand producing multiple lines of skin care products. Now, assume that they retarget website visitors and keep track of the average time that each visitor spends on a product.

A pattern can be seen is that for women aged 40 and above, they spend the time looking at anti-aging products, while for women aged between 22-30, their main concerns are whitening and moisturizing. Thus, company A knows what type of products they should show in the following ads for a particular customer at other websites.

Conclusion

In short, Buyer persona and Retarget marketing have a symbiotic relationship. Marketers can utilize insights from remarketing campaigns to improve Buyer persona models. Conversely, Buyer persona filters and navigates the appropriate set of customers to implement retargeting.