Target Audience and Buyer Persona – What’s the Difference? (With Samples)

Closing a sale isn’t as easy as it used to be. There is a good chance that your prospects would have an idea on who you are and some of your competitors by the time they land on your website. 

However, most of them would likely to still be on the fence and not ready to make a purchase. While you have their attention, it’s the little things you do along the way that will push them to eventually make that purchase decision. 

How much do you know about your prospective customers? Identifying your target market and creating your buyer personas is part of market segmentation that can make all the difference for any business looking to improve its marketing effectiveness. 

Market segmentation creates subsets of a market based on specific needs, priorities, demographics, and other behavioral criteria. The business can then pinpoint the exact kind of messaging that will drive prospective customers to make a purchase. 

This in turn helps the business achieve higher ROI from its marketing investments and prevent any wasteful activities and strategies.

What is a Target Audience?

A target audience is a segment within a target market. While a target market broadly refers to a group of B2C or B2B users who care about a certain product or service, a target audience refers to the specific users within a predefined market who have been identified as the ideal recipients of particular marketing messaging. 

If a business isn’t out there speaking to a specific group of potential customers, there’s a good chance its marketing messages will be drowned out in a world of marketing noise. 

Commercial success, particularly for small businesses, depends on how much business owners can differentiate their businesses from the competition. Many already know too well how frustrating it can get when you try to sell to everyone. 

What is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional but research-based characterization of a user who might purchase certain goods and services, use a website, or interact with certain apps or tools. 

We recently created a simple, 4-step approach on how to create a buyer persona. 

While buyer personas are the idealized users or buyers, they are developed using actual data and market research. They are one of the most crucial pieces of any marketing strategy and they help businesses to both understand their targeted audiences and to develop more prospect-oriented marketing campaigns. 

The Relationship Between Target Audiences and Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are created from the data collected from prospects and actual customers, in other words, the target market. Your marketing strategy should develop specific messaging for certain audiences within the overall target market. These audiences will comprise the different buyer personas within the target market. 

Let’s use a simple illustration using our own company to show how our target audiences and potential buyer personas are interlinked. We provide content marketing services to businesses and therefore, the target audience would be business owners and marketing professionals:

Buyer Persona 1:

Jake is a 40-yeard old male who lives in Toronto where he runs a small business that generates a monthly revenue of $25,000. He wants to grow his business so that he can have a stable income to give his family a decent life, like a responsible husband and father should do.

He likes to spend his free time on social media sites like Facebook, catching up with old friends and family. On weekends he enjoys hanging out with this kids in the park. However, Jake also uses LinkedIn and has a strict rule of separating his personal and business matters from his social media platforms. 

But Jake’s website ranks poorly in search engine results pages and doesn’t quite attract the kind of steady traffic he requires to run a stable business and grow his business. He constantly fears that he may lose his ground over his competitors. If this happens, he would not be able to send his kids to college. 

Jake doesn’t seem to buy into the idea that content marketing can attract the kind of traffic he knows he needs to grow his business.

Buyer Persona 2:

Dianne is the marketing professional of a growing mid-sized business based in Ontario. She is 30 years old, single, and enjoys spending time online, catching up with her friends and family. She’s a fitness enthusiast who spends a lot of time in the gym.

Dianne is a trained digital marketing professional who wants to get to the top of her field. She is tasked with growing the company’s online presence and increasing the number of leads. The company currently brings in average monthly revenues of $55,000 but the top management feel that they can do more.

However, Dianne is a one-person marketing team and she executes all the digital marketing strategies and activities. She knows that she can do more if she engages a content marketing expert but she seems to be a little apprehensive about the cost and the ROI.

Why You Should Tailor Your Content Specifically to Your Buyer Personas

The two examples of buyer personas reveal how crucial it is to both identify and understand you target audience. A business may have several buyer personas for the same products and services within the same target market. 

Therefore, your marketing content will be more effective and resonate with your audiences if it was designed specifically for your buyer personas. 

The purpose of marketing is to attract leads or potential customers. Therefore, tailoring marketing messages or marketing content to specific audiences will speak to their specific needs or motivations and in turn, increase your conversion rates.

In short, the more you flesh out both your buyer personas and target audience, the easier it will become to create the kind of content they are likely to react to or to engage with. 

Your prospects aren’t likely to get excited about content designed for a broad audience as it is less likely that they will relate to the messaging. This presents the risk of running an unprofitable marketing campaign. Instead, narrowing down your target audiences and creating more tailed and relevant content will generate positive results.

Conclusion

Business owners sometimes make assumptions and sweeping generalizations about their target markets. Having an understanding of what target audiences and buyer personas are can determine the effectiveness of a marketing campaign.

When you have collected the demographic data and identified their various pain points, figuring out what makes them tick will help you identify the most effective way to present your products and services to them so they can easily see that it’s exactly what they need.

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Other Related Blog Posts:

• How To Create A Buyer Persona In 4 Simple Steps