Digital Selling – Buying personas

Dave Harries: Grant, in Digital Selling, you talk a lot about segmentation of the market, and really understanding who it is you’re selling to, and you talk about something called the “buying personas.” Could you explain that to me, what that really means?

Grant Leboff: Yes. The idea of a buying persona is just creating a picture of what a client looks like. You may have one buying persona; if you’ve got four different segments, you might have four buying personas. It’s kind of creating a real human being, if you like. Let’s say one of your markets was single young ladies, all right? You might actually create a typical 22-year-old in your marketplace, call her Charlotte, or whatever you’re going to call her, and actually create the things she likes, the things she doesn’t like, the types of area she lives in, the type of lifestyle she lives.

The reason for doing that is this: I had the great privilege of interviewing Drayton Bird, who is one of the great marketers of all time, and during that interview, one of the things he said to me was he said, “Grant, when you communicate, you can’t communicate to anybody, you have to communicate to somebody.” It’s absolutely right. If you really want your communications to resonate and touch someone, you have to have someone in mind, and buying personas kind of allows you to do that. It’s a way of kind of making your marketplace real and come alive, so you know who you’re communicating with. Part of the buying persona is basic demography, what’s their age, what’s their gender, what’s their income bracket, those kind of things, but there’s also a psychographic element, which is what are the things they care about, what are the things that they’re interested in?

For example, if you were selling a vegan product, you might say that one of the things we know that our marketplace is in from a psychographic is they’re interested in the environment, because disproportionately, they are, as a group. You look at some of the psychographics, and some of the beliefs that those people have as well, and all this goes into a buying persona, so you have a real idea and understanding of who you’re communicating with. It just means you create better comms.

Dave Harries: How specific should you actually get in this persona? Does that depend on your brand, and what you’re selling, and that sort of thing?

Grant Leboff: Yeah, I think you can get quite specific. A lot of this is evidence-based, because you should be able to look … I mean, it’s different if you’re a startup, I understand, but if you’re an existing trading business, you’ve got customers. Go have a look at the data, go and have a look at what they look like. What are the patterns, what are the things they do, what are the lifestyles they live? One of the things that social media allows us to do is actually get much more insight on our existing customers, because you can see 80% of them like football, because they post about it online, and things like that. A lot of this is evidence-based, not all of it. Some of it’s qualitative, some of it’s quantitative, but nevertheless, you can get exact enough to really make sure that communication is resonating with your community.

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