Buyer persona in the logistics sector: How to define it?

In recent years, the logistics industry has begun to encourage much more involved participation in the supply chain, aimed at offering a better product delivery service to the customer. Part of that connection lies in the fact of building a buyer persona in the logistics sector.

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A buyer persona is a potential customer that summarizes the demographic, psychographic, and behavioral data so that companies can determine through which channels to target the audience, how to carry out the sales approach, and what content is transmitted through each of the marketing channels, among other issues.

The objective of developing a buyer persona is to understand that the more specificity is achieved by reaching more people with the same profile, the greater the return on investment of these actions because we know that we are going to bring greater benefits to those we target.

By developing a buyer persona, you are creating a stereotype about the type of people who would be interested in your product or service. Any piece of information that you can obtain about your target buyers can be very beneficial to strengthening the logistics sector of your company.

The objective of this article is to determine the steps to follow to build a suitable buyer persona and what relevant elements to take into account at each stage regarding the audience to which we aim our business.

How to define the buyer persona?

There is a process by which we can define a buyer persona in the logistics sector from which the information you need to create it is segmented. A starting point could be to identify the positions that your buyer persona occupies in the logistics industry, such as a founding CEO, an operations manager, a commercial manager, etc.

From this perspective, your potential customers of a logistics company will be professionals from the logistics industry, but also companies from other areas that require your outsourced services, as well as consumers who only buy the product for their personal use.

Having clarified the panorama, now we can begin to define our buyer persona in the logistics sector.

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1. Understand what are the "pain points" that the person has.

In this first stage, we try to identify the problems that afflict the different profiles of people. Within the world of logistics, the pain points that you can face are, for example, that your products do not arrive on time, that you cannot find the correct logistics operator, or that you do not understand how to send your products to your consumers.

A logistics company can be both a final consumer and a company that needs to ship to its consumers.

2. Determine demographics.

In this step, we must mainly investigate how old our consumers are and what geographical areas they are from. Typically, to define a buyer persona.

As we said at the beginning, if our buyer personas are not final consumers and are logistics professionals, we must not fail to identify what role they occupy within their business. For example, if it is a decision-maker, a business owner, or simply a contact that will later help us scale.

The more data we can collect demographically, the more and better we can understand our buyer persona in the logistics sector, and our product will be better focused on that ideal customer.

3. Channels in which the buyer persona prefers to be contacted.

In the logistics industry, people often look for solutions through search engines, that is, googling the problems that affect them to detect possible alternative solutions. They also browse social networks to interact with other people. Based on what we define in the demographic profile, we will determine which channels they like.

For example, they are people who circulate a lot on the street, they enjoy seeing posters on public roads, they are also people who listen to the radio and from there, we define the marketing channels through which we are going to make the commercial approach.

4. Selection of the aspects that the buyer persona does not like.

In this last stage of the construction of a buyer persona in the logistics sector, once the pain points of people have been detected, demographic data has been collected, the channels in which they navigate and the users wish to be contacted, you must identify the negative tastes of people to take into account before defining the actions in your logistics processes.

For example, most people agree that they hate delivery delays or not being notified of delays, or not being notified that they are carrying the product to be received. In short, people hate it when the delivery of their products is delayed and when companies do not communicate with them to have a follow-up of the last logistic mile.

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In short, creating a buyer persona in the logistics sector will allow you to deal with people's problems more efficiently and know how to produce appropriate solutions tailored to your customers. Having the opportunity to get to know them through their demographic data, personal tastes, expectations, and channels in which they are handled will help you know where to find them and better understand their needs, offering a more optimized customer experience.