Studying Customer Behaviour by Creating Buyer Personas

CX Insights
Jul 21, 2017 · 3 min read

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer that’s created by studying demographics, attitudes and buying patterns. Detailed buyer personas guide everything from product development to marketing decisions, improving your business’s ability to identify, cultivate and convert the best leads into loyal customers.

Developing an Effective B2B/B2C Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are more than just a brief summary of your target consumers. They are a fully developed, thoughtfully cultivated portfolio that helps you better understand your buyers’ needs, knowledge of your products and services, how your buyers consume media, which communication channels they prefer, who influences their buying decisions, and how they will respond to different messages.

When developing buyer personas, businesses need to focus less on the personal habits of these personas and more on the motivating factors that influence how personas develop consensus, visualize objectives and manage professional obstacles.

In the age of e-commerce, how your personas behave online also matters. The implications for e-commerce are vast. Online retailers are best served when they build marketing campaigns based on shopper behavior, rather than demographic assumptions.

Analysing Customer Behaviour

Now here are some questions that will help you build a consumer profile, and will also determine the different types of customers which buy your product and the influences which make them buy.

1) Who buys your products and services? –First get an idea of the ideal customer you would like to target.

2) Who makes the decision to buy the product? — Many a times, the purchase may be made by someone but the decision is not theirs.

3) Who influences the decision to buy the product?

4) How is the purchase decision made?

5) Why does the customer buy? –Each customer may buy a product for different reasons and you can analyse consumer behavior on the basis of WHY they are buying that product.

6) Why is the consumer preferring one brand over another? –If you analyse why the customer is preferring one brand over another, you will find many features and characteristics which the customer prefers and hence he is inclined towards one brand more than the other.

7) Where do customers go to buy the brand? — The manner in which the customer is buying a brand, tells a lot about how far the customer is ready to go to buy the brand. This aspect of consumer behavior will be different for each customer and give insight for consumer behavior analysis.

8) When do customers buy a product? — For instance, a client is buying new interior design equipment for his office because he is building his new office. So these are the stimulus due to which the customer has decided to buy the product. You need to know whether the stimulus is seasonal, is it external or internal.

9) What is the product’s perception? — Is the product perceived as a value for money product or is it perceived as premium? In fact, the product can face a problem if it is neither VFM nor premium, because this means that the product does not have a clear target audience. The perception of the product plays a major role in generating word of mouth.

10) What social factors influences the purchase decision?– Social factors are a major factor in influencing consumer behavior and they are important to analyse consumer behavior as well.

11) What is the role of consumer’s lifestyle in his behavior? — A reader is more likely to buy a Kindle or a similar reading decide. You need to analyse your customers’ lifestyle to analyse consumer behavior.

12) What role does personal or demographic factor play in purchase decision? — An elderly person will buy completely different products as compared to a youngster. Similarly, a blue collared worker will have different needs as compared to a white collared one. The variance is also observed when there are demographic factors at play.

By understanding what motivates and drives your target buyers, your business will be best positioned to capitalize on the booming e-commerce marketplace and customize your website to meet your buyers’ most pressing needs.

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