What is the difference between target audience and buyer persona?

Correctly defining your company’s target audience and buyer persona is essential for designing an appropriate marketing strategy. 

However, it can be difficult to understand the difference between one and the other.

From Kairós, we want to help you to be on the safe side in your adventure in the world of Marketing, so in today’s post we are going to explain:

Differences between Target Audience and Buyer Persona

At Kairós we focus a lot on this difference when it comes to studying, sharing and implementing strategies for our clients. And now we are going to detail it for you.

What is my target audience?

The target audience refers to the group of consumers in the market who have certain characteristics that will make them more interested in your product.

The target audience usually focuses simply on demographic and psychographic information. Thus, it collects data such as place of residence, gender, age, marital status…

In other words, the target audience studies the attitudes and behaviours that will condition the purchasing decisions of a specific group of people.

The target audience is a very important first segmentation. It is an intermediate step between the total audience and our buyer persona.

So, what is a buyer persona?

The buyer persona is the ideal customer of your company. That is, the buyer persona is a user who is part of your target audience and who, in addition, has the perfect characteristics to be a consumer of your brand.

The buyer persona is a semi-fictitious character that we must define in detail, as it will help us to understand our customer much better. When we create our buyer persona, we must give it a name, a routine and a way of life, understand their passions, motivations…

What is the point of creating a buyer persona?

Gathering all the information we have about the target audience in a single person and giving them a name and a story will help us to create much more direct and efficient messages.

It is very important and very interesting to know how to address our buyer persona, both in newsletters and networks, the semantic nuance on the web, and in sales letters. 

There is no one better than us to write and address our buyer persona.

Example of the differences between Target Audience and Buyer Persona

If we address only the target audience, we will be talking to a group of middle class women between 30 and 40 years old. 

On the contrary, talking directly to Sara, (our buyer persona) a 35 year old veterinarian who lives in Madrid, who is married and has two children. She is interested not only in animals, but also in economics and shopping on Instagram, is much easier and will make our messages much more convincing as they are specifically aimed at her.

In short, having a well-defined target audience and buyer persona is key to better understand your customer and, in this way, to be able to develop much more effective and profitable marketing strategies.

At kairós we do a previous and coordinated work with our clients, emphasising the importance of having a well-defined target audience, for example, to launch paid advertising strategies and develop persuasive texts in those advertisements, based on the buyer persona.