Read this post, and you will know who is your ideal customer, and how you can use this information for developing software

Buyer person and Customer Archetypes. Have you heard anything about these terms? Both are marketing practices applied to business, but these practices have been so effective that I can safely say that it is viable to use them for multiple purposes when we are starting up, taking off, or innovating our business model. 

Both techniques help us to create or improve our value proposals according to what need or want our ideal customers because we define them and bring them life in a character. 

If we know them, we can satisfy their pain or necessity, and better, we even have the opportunity to create a need in their life.

Buyer Person

After we have the segmentation, the market niche to occupy with our product or service, the next step is to investigate and mix some of these qualities in a character who has a name, age, interests, personality, dislikes, needs, environment, philosophies, thoughts, and other specific characteristics. 

The segmentation has a geographical, demographic, psychological factor, and several data. Study the information, choose specific data from each item, and add it to your character. 

The important thing is having a perfectly defined buyer so that you can create content, develop the functionalities of your new software, improve or adapt your enterprise systems according to the expectations, desires, and even the personality of your ideal customer.

You should know: this ideal customer practice for software development works even for B2B. In this case, the character would be the descriptions of another business or the business manager.

For example:

I work for Cobuild Lab, a company that provides SaaS or Software as a Service. Our Buyer person is a small business manager who specialized in one specific industry in the United States. There are more data about him, but in essence, that's it.

Customer Archetypes

The customer archetype is the next step after building the character of your ideal customer. 

Once we know the qualities of the person, we must define his behavior, how he relates to his environment, his rituals. 

Customer Archetype refers to the understanding with soft and hard data about the life and daily costume of that ideal user we created on paper. 

This data can be obtained through research, you can make interviews or even surveys to people who resemble the character of your ideal customer, or if you want to go a little further, you can make a big data study. 

The practical purpose of this information is to create software, content, or whatever based on the profile and behavior of a tangible person: your ideal customer. In that way, you will have more chances to create effectively and assertively. 

This is the summary of a post about Buyer Persona and Customer Archetypes that we shared some time ago in the Cobuild Lab blog. I invite you to read it, to get more information about it.