What is the buyer role?
The buyer role is a detailed description of the person who represents your target audience. This role is fictitious, but based on in-depth research on your existing or desired audience.
You may also hear it called a customer role, an audience role, or a marketing role.
You cannot understand each customer or potential customer individually. But you can create a customer role to represent your customer base. (That being said: since different types of customers may buy your product for different reasons, you may need to create multiple buyer roles.）
You will name the buyer role, demographic details, interests, and behavioral characteristics. You will learn about their goals, pain points, and purchase patterns. If you want, you can even use gallery photography or illustrations to give them a face-because maybe it’s important for your team to add a face to their name.
Basically, you want to think and talk about this model customer as if they are a real person. This will allow you to make marketing messages specifically for them.
Keep your buyer role (or role s) in mind that everything has the same voice and direction, from product development to your brand voice to the social channels you use.
Why use the buyer or audience role?
The buyer role allows you to focus on solving the customer’s priorities, not your own.
Every time you make a decision on a social marketing strategy (or overall marketing strategy), consider your buyer role.
Does the new activity meet the needs and goals of at least one of your buyer roles? If not, you have every reason to reconsider your plan, no matter how exciting it is.
Once you have defined your buyer role, you can create natural posts and social ads that directly talk to the target customers you define. Especially social advertising, which provides extremely detailed social targeting options, allowing your ads to appear in front of the right people.
Develop your social strategy on the basis of helping your character achieve your goals, and you will connect with the real customers they represent. All this is to build brand loyalty and trust, and ultimately simplify your sales process.
How to create a buyer role step by step
Your buyer role shouldn’t just be the person you want to associate with: they should be based on real-world data and strategic goals. Here’s how to create a fictional customer that fits perfectly with your real brand.
1. Conduct thorough audience research
It’s time to dig deeper. Who are your existing customers? Who is your social audience? Who is your competitor’s goal? To learn more about these concepts, please check out our complete audience research guide, but at the same time……
Compile audience data from your social media analysis (especially Facebook Audience Insights), your customer database, and Google Analytics to narrow down the following details：
- age
- location
- language
- Spending power and patterns
- interest
- challenge
- Life stage
For B2B: the size of the enterprise and the maker of purchase decisions
Make sure you understand which social channels your audience uses is also a good idea. Used by Brandwatch,Keyhole.co And tools such as Moyens I/O Insights, which is supported by Google Analytics, to find out how much time they have spent online.
You can also find out who your competitors are targeting using tools such as Buzzsumo and Moyens I/O’s search stream.
For more detailed strategies, please check out our full post on how to use social tools for competitor research.
2. Identify customer goals and pain points
The target of your audience may be personal or professional, depending on the type of products and services you sell. What motivates your customers? What is their ending?
On the other hand is their pain point. What problems or troubles are your potential customers trying to solve? What hinders their success? What obstacles do they face in achieving their goals?
Your sales team and customer support department are a good way to find answers to these questions, but another key option is to do some social listening and social media sentiment analysis.
Set up a search stream to monitor mentions of your brand, products, and competitors, allowing you to understand what people are saying about you online in real time. You can understand why they like your product, or which parts of the customer experience don’t work.
3. Learn how to help
Now that you have mastered the goals and difficulties of your customers, it’s time to consider how to help. This means going beyond just thinking about characteristics and analyzing the true benefits of your product or service.
The function is what your product is or does. The benefit is how your product or service makes your customers’ lives easier or better.
Consider the main purchase barriers of your audience and the position of your followers in the purchase process? Then ask yourself: Can we help you? Capture the answer in a clear sentence.
4. Create your buyer role
Collect all your research and start looking for common features. When you combine these characteristics together, you will have the foundation of a unique customer role.
Give your buyer role a name, a position, a home, and other defining characteristics. You want your character to look like a real person.
For example, suppose you identify your core customer base as a 40-year-old urban woman with a successful career, no children, and a passion for first-class restaurants. Your buyer role may be “high achiever Haley”.
She is 41 years old this year.
She takes spinning classes three times a week.
She lives in Toronto and is the founder of her own public relations company.
She owns a Tesla.
She and her partner take international vacations twice a year and prefer to stay in boutique hotels.
She is a member of the wine club.
You understand the point: this is not just a list of features. This is a detailed and specific description of a potential customer. It allows you to think about your future buyers in a human way, so they are not just a collection of data points. These things may not necessarily apply to every buyer in your audience, but they help to represent a prototype in a tangible way.
Aim for the amount of information you want to see on dating sites (although don’t forget to include pain points… This will not necessarily appear on Bumble).
When you enrich your customer roles, be sure to describe who each role is now and who they want to be. This allows you to start thinking about how your products and services can help them achieve their goals.
Buyer role example
Brands can create and share their buyer roles with the team in a variety of different ways. It may be a list of points; it may be a powerful, multi-paragraph story. It may include stock photos or illustrations. There is no wrong way to format these reference documents: do it in any way that helps your team best understand your customers (and target roles).
A mother with a sense of beauty and a love of magazines, named Carla
This is an example of UX designer James Donovan. It fleshes out the buyer role of a fictional client named Karla Kruger, including detailed information about her job, age, and demographic statistics-and of course her pain points and goals. She is 41 years old and pregnant, and we have vivid details about her product preferences and beauty habits.
The interesting thing about this example is that it also includes her media consumption and favorite brands. Details are the key to bringing the customer’s role to life, so be specific!
