DETAILED VERSION FOR THOSE OF US WHO WANT IT ALL

From start to finish, the whole process is messy. Especially for those of you who are marketing managers or brand managers. Implementing the strategy, tactics, and actions while using the right tone of voice and mix of channels, media, and audiences in the right order in the best moments is messy. You have all this information, and you have to take it into account, use it wisely, and decide when, where and how to use it.

Part of this huge process is understanding your buyer types and their particularities. But this is also messy and it can actually be even harder to understand, simplify, and make actionable. Most of the clients I’ve talked to, worked with or consulted for over years had a s**t tone of data. Qualitative, quantitative, observational, digital or offline. If you can name it, most likely I’ve seen it.

Yet, a lot of clients struggle with clarity over the bigger picture. Tiny disclaimer here: allow me please to settle this — the client, for me, is the business that I work with, while the user / buyer is my client’s client.

DOES ANY OF IT SOUND FAMILIAR?

If you’re a junior, probably not. But if you’ve worked in the communication / marketing department for 1-2 years, you’ve most likely experienced these:

Awareness campaigns where you have to grow your brand, turn it into top of mind choice or increase predisposition to buy or recommend your brand or increase brand authority.

If you work with a big brand, you have one or two (if you are lucky enough to have the budget) image campaigns per year where you want to emphasize your mission, values and the positives of your brand, not the product.

Then you have product campaigns (launch, rebranding, redesign, promo etc).

You also have some special campaigns and activations.

And most definitely you have your sales campaigns (Christmas, Easter, Valentine’s Day, 1st of March, 8th of March, Halloween, Black Friday, White Friday, Summer Friday, Back to school, Summer sales, Winter sales, End of season, Start of season, you name it).

You work with the brand agency. Maybe you have a dedicated digital agency, production agency or BTL agency.

You have your performance campaigns and SEO and content.

Social Media: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, maybe even Twitter and LinkedIn.

Once a year the research company brings you new data and instead of making things simpler, this makes it even harder to remain focused.

This is where clear, simple and easy to follow strategies and frameworks come in to save you from going nuts.

BUYER TYPES — SMALL BITS FOR BIG GAMES

I decided to start with the typologies of buyers because I think they are more important than most of us like to admit.

You already have our target audience in place, we all know we want to communicate with 18 to 60 y.o., average income, higher education, male and female. Like the many. “We have a mass product and we want to be appealing for everybody and communicate with all of them out there”. If you’ve worked for at least 6 months in advertising I guess you’ve already heard this once or twice. But if there’s one thing we’ve learned as a species over the centuries is that you can’t make everyone happy through one thing. There is no universal 1 thing that works for a large number of people. Because we are not the same. We come from different backgrounds, grew up in different environments, learned different things in school, read different books growing up and developed different behaviors and patterns of thinking.

OK, this sounds even more complicated than the first 3 paragraphs. What do we do with this? How do we simplify and transform it in something easy to handle?

THERE ARE TWO WAYS:

EXCLUDE

Exclude the secondary target and try to find some common characteristics that can bring you closer to the core audience, while trying to attract as many as possible from the secondary target

or…

MICRO-COMMUNICATE

Split and group the target in clusters based on how they decide to buy and the way they decide what to buy. After that, you design micro campaigns that reach out to them on the exact level they are in the buying decision funnel.

BUYER TYPES — WHAT KINDS ARE THERE?

The beauty of our differences as humans is that we are not that different. And from this thought, we can split our target into typologies of consumers or buyer types. We don’t need to psychoanalyze individuals to see what makes them tick. We just have to figure out what behavior patterns they have in common with other individuals thus creating the clusters mentioned above. From here we can build our buyer types.

AND HERE ARE SOME EXAMPLES:

EXPLORER

They kinda know what their need is, but they don’t know not exactly. They’re constantly looking for inspiration to see what their options are. Usually, they are the ones who browse inside the category back and forth, visit a lot of product pages and read a lot. They are curious and like to explore, but they are some of the most disloyal buyer types.

Explorers get frustrated fast if they don’t find enough information about what they are looking for or if the pictures are small and blurry. When they find something they like, they want it THEN. Not next week, not tomorrow. They want it right then and there.

The best strategies to communicate with them is to establish your presence across all social media, have big, colorful pictures and include storytelling in your blog posts.

One of the most powerful tactic is to send them event-based triggers, or promos that are perceived as very personal.

PLANNER

The planners know exactly what they need, what specs it should have, what budget it should fit in, when and where.

These buyer types are the ones most likely to use the search bar or go directly to the category page, filter, sort, scroll-scroll-scroll, click, read a bit and decide fast if they will search in other places (maybe to find a better price or some added value like free shipping or overnight shipping).

They get frustrated if the relevant information is hidden between piles of fluff and irrelevant things. Moreover, they get frustrated if they don’t find the product in stock or in the exact color they want.

The best strategy is to be accessible and have an incredibly good user experience and customer experience. If you can make them love your brand, they become some of your most loyal buyer types.

And the best tactics are understanding his needs, sending him relevant newsletters and generating content that is very specific and easy to access.