Step Into Their Shoes: Leveraging Buyer Personas for Brand Success

To truly understand someone—seeing the world from their perspective—takes more than effort. It requires a deep dive into research and a genuine curiosity about their needs and desires. As marketers, we have the unique opportunity to do just that: to step into our customers' shoes and understand them on a more detailed level. But how can you provide value to someone you don’t fully understand? No two people are exactly alike, but many share interests, characteristics, or needs. This is where buyer personas come in. Knowing your buyer personas is crucial; it’s the foundation for building a strong, mutually beneficial relationship with your customers.

The critical advantage of a Buyer Persona

The main benefit of buyer personas is established by Flori Needle from Hubspot as the instrument that allows you to: “Personalize your marketing… the key to making more sales”. Indeed, after you identify your perfect customer, you can provide communications that make sense for them and build effective messages that reinforce brand connection and trust with your customers, influencing and improving their experience by personalizing the content you create. The problem is that even though personalized experiences may sound obvious, reality is way beyond the ideal situation, as the following graph shows:

Source: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/buyer-persona-research

Creating personalized experiences in your organization

After many years working as a marketing consultant for renowned brands in South America, I believe it would be helpful to provide you with some examples from my professional experience that will give insight into how you can apply what you have learned from your buyer persona and impact your organization.

1. Product Development and feedback: Buyer personas can help you even before your product or service is released. They can be a key tool in product creation and market testing. You can develop a tailor-made solution that works for them, providing value by fulfilling an unattended need. When I worked for Veet Colombia, our digital marketing team realized that men's interest in the cream hair remover industry was growing immensely, but there were no products for men yet. So, we crafted the buyer persona to choose which of our portfolio products from different countries would better meet the needs of Colombian men who were desperately looking for an alternative to razors. Identifying the characteristics of our buyer allowed us to develop communications for someone who wanted fast results and without pain.

2. Tailored Campaigns and Event Marketing: By understanding hobbies, motivations, and lifestyles, you can develop marketing events where every aspect resonates with your customer. For example, at Durex. the company celebrated Pride Month with an outdoor run where diversity and the freedom to express ourselves was celebrated. The event was a success and covered by all media outlets, while active customers shared their experience on social media, giving the brand exposure and reinforcing positive brand associations.

3. Customer pain points: Once you identified who your ideal customer is, you also understand their typical frustrations or concerns; when working in Enfamil Peru, we quickly learned that the customer journey for a mother wanting to buy baby formula starts way before the newborn is welcomed into the world, mothers have to research complicated scientific terms that they had little to no understanding way before the baby is here, terms as“Docosahexaenoic acid, polydextrose, galactooligosaccharides” are overwhelming, so we made sure our website called Enfabebe, was seen as a Hub with relevant content that taught moms or soon to be mothers the meaning of all different terms and their importance, allowing us to build trust and connection with them even before the great day had even arrived.

In my experience, I’ve observed a recurring pattern: the best marketers genuinely care about the customer. Instead of trying to sell something forcefully, they take the time to research their target audience and make an effort to understand their wants and needs to craft something of value that can be delivered conveniently.

Identify your buyer persona, take them into account, and start taking a holistic view of all your marketing practices—your brand will definitely thank you.

The ideas and perspectives expressed in this article are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of any organization or entity with which I am affiliated.All brand names, logos, and trademarks mentioned in this blog are the property of their respective owners. This blog is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any of the brands mentioned. Any opinions expressed are my own and do not reflect the views or opinions of the brand owners.