For Class October 11th

For this weeks set of readings, the topic was buyer personas. The purpose of buyer personas is for marketers to gain insights on buyers to gain knowledge about their spending habits and emotional buying to specifically target them in groups. Each link delivered the same message, they are very important, but don't be frustrated if they don't answer every question every time. I really understood what the authors said because it opened my eyes to ways I can target my own customers in my own business's. With online customers still trending more positively, online research and the creation of buyer personas can be a huge step in the marketing aspects of any business.

One thing I found very interesting was the creation of an actual person when creating a buyer persona. All articles said that it is a huge help to marketers as they can create an emotion and a face when creating buyer personas to target certain audiences. This is something very new to me as I have never heard of that before, and I believe thats why I found it to be so interesting.

Another thing that interested me were two concepts "keep it fictional, but keep it realistic" and, "the first draft is not the final draft" . These concepts stuck with me because I believe it goes hand in hand with the creation of a face and identity for the buyer personas. Because this is fictional, its good to realize that wen doing research in order to keep focus and research on what your actually looking for. If the fiction gets in the way, the research may end up in a waist of time. The second concept stuck with me because just learning what buyer personas are it was good to hear that they are not finalized the first time around. Because you can edit things gave me confidence when being forced to create my own.

The third thing that interested me was the social media side of buyer personas. What I found most interesting was how marketers will quite literally stalk consumers into their LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, in hopes to find information on what kind of engagements they have, and what kind of buyers they are. This led me to the question, have I ever been searched by marketers into my own social media?

3 questions:

Are their certain businesses that buyer personas work best for compared to others?

How do you know who to focus most on to create buyer personas?

Are surveying customers better then online research when creating buyer personas?