If you’re about to start your entrepreneurship journey, it’s fundamental you know your buyer persona; otherwise, your costs will keep escalating and here’s why:

You’re investing more efforts than necessary in a public that might not be representing your main target.

You have no idea who you’re talking to, or, in other words, you don’t know the person that needs this product, service or solution you’re offering.

As a first step, we understand that a buyer persona is that person or audience that could benefit from your idea. And we’re not wrong when we say that at least 90% of the entrepreneurs who are starting a business for the first time have no idea who they’re talking to; and if they think they do, they haven’t analysed their audience enough. So, defining your target client should be one of your priorities in the list of your validation process.

But, why do we talk about validation? It’s simple, the majority of entrepreneurs think their idea is great, according to their perception because they’re offering a solution and meeting a necessity to improve someone else’s life. But who would that ‘someone’ be? If you have a precise idea and you want to get it validated, first you’ve to define who you’re going to benefit with this project. If you have a fantastic idea but you don’t know who you should sell it to, you need to reconsider the potential of your project.

It’s true that at the beginning you don’t have enough information, any research or specific data because you haven’t made your first sale yet. This means, without clients, you can’t compare ages, likes, status or geographic location. However, you have to appeal to the “estimation”, also called “prediction”; those anticipations will help you to verify if the proposal is well defined. To achieve this, you have to split your research into two main categories:

Demographic characteristics

Demography includes features such as age, sex, social status or marital status. It’s about very basic information and knowing this is very important because you can segment your marketing message.

Your proposal should be adapted according to the traces and characteristics of these people, meaning: ways to communicate, presentation aesthetics, and more. Of course, a marketing campaign that is targeted to a 60-year-old can’t be the same for someone who’s 30 years old. As we mentioned before, if you start communication campaigns without understanding your target and how to talk to them, you’re wasting money.

In the same way, it’s important to understand that not all businesses are the same. It’s true that there are bigger audiences than others but even when the audience is excessively wide, there’s always an ideal buyer persona.

Once you have all the data, you can use tools such as Facebook Audience Insights or Google Analytics to create segments for each one of your business efforts.

The turning point

For this research is important to take two big groups into account when it comes to entrepreneurship, especially the tech industry: the innovators and the early adopters.

Basically, when an entrepreneur makes his idea public, he needs to detect who offers a lower resistance. In other words, who are the people that are going to have blind faith in you.

The innovator is the person that’s always looking for the latest trends. The same person that queues outside of the Apple store one day before the release of the newest iPhone. The same one that is not afraid to waste time or money on trying something new because his priority is being the first person to do it. They don’t really care about technique or quality, it’s about trying something new before everyone else.

Then, you have the early adopters. They’re quite similar but the early adopters need to see actual proof of the new trend. They’re going to buy something just after a friend has done it first. They don’t need further validation than knowing someone else has tried it first. Early adopters are not interested on being the first ones but also not on being the last ones either.

So, depending on the project, it’s a good strategy to invest the first efforts in these people. They work as a kind of guinea pigs that will give you feedback, help you to improve the product and in the long term, they will also help you to promote it.

Psychographic characteristics

Everything that’s planned behind the product, is what gets the client. People consume a product because it reinforces important emotional areas in them. Especially when they’re part of the market for a different purpose rather than just economic reasons.

The psychographic characteristics of an audience consist of finding out what are their fears, their goals, what they want to be, who they want to be and what’s their lifestyle.

For example, if you have a fashion project, you could ask yourself: what do you want to achieve with your product? Do you want to adress people or do you want to make them feel good about themselves? What do you want to achieve at an emotional level? All the biggest companies have these emotional reasons behind their brands.

Finally, we’d like to recommend Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insights into your costumer’s expectations align your marketing strategies of Adele Revella. A practical book that can help you understand your buyers and their decision-making process.

This blog post has been published by Latinpreneur and shared to Original Campus. See the original article here