Types of Buyer Personas in the Vape Industry

Everyone involved in any business has one goal: To make their business grow as fast and as steadily as possible. As you probably already know, marketing is the key to growing your business, especially if you’re in the retail business.

But to start off on the right foot with your marketing strategy you’ll first need to understand who you’re selling to and adjust your marketing strategy to those particular clients. This is why you first need to define a buyer persona. If this makes you feel a little lost, then you’re in luck. We already have a few buyer personas we’ve identified that could point you in the right direction, but better yet, we can help you identify your own vape buyer personas.

What Is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a representation of what your ideal customer is. Identifying a single or multiple buyer personas will help you understand the audience of potential buyers you want to attract and convert into loyal clients. Having an understanding of your buyer persona allows you to optimize your marketing and sales strategies.

Developing your buyer personas is an essential part of creating content, designing your store or products, lead generation, sales efforts, and pretty much any activity that is focused on client acquisition and retention.

You might have noticed that we keep mentioning buyer personaS, plural. This is because, in most cases, every business has multiple buyer personas to sell to. For instance, you might have vapers aged 18-25 years old which can be quite similar, but what about clients 25-35, or 50-60 years old? It doesn’t stop there, you could cater to women, men, former smokers, first-time vapers, and people with multiple other features that make them a part of a different set of buyer personas.

In other words:

It’s recommended to have more than a single buyer persona. Having a low number of buyers identified may limit the effectiveness of your marketing strategy. But it would be a misuse of judgment to say whether you should have 2 or 20 buyer personas. There is no firm answer in terms of numbers, but you should have as many buyer personas as you’re able to identify, no more, no less.

Once you’ve identified your buyer personas you can start using them to personalize your brand’s message. This includes what you write on your website, ads, emails, social media, and everything else on any other platform. Combining this strategy with your customer’s life cycle can be very powerful because it will allow you to decide correctly on the type of content you should be publishing or sending out. This may also help you segment your market down further and make your sales strategy more effective in the long run.

What Is the Difference Between a Buyer Persona and a User Persona?

You might have also heard the term ‘user persona’ being used. And while they’re similar terms, they’re not the same. They are both representations of your customers, but a user persona only represents consumers, those who actually use the product you’re distributing. In your and our cases, we would be referring to vapers.

But a buyer persona is a much more broad term that includes all types of buyers, not only users. In other words, a buyer persona is the type of person or client that is making the purchase, regardless of whether they’re using the product or not. In your case, you might be distributing your products to other vape shops. This makes those people buyers, but not users.

Types of Vape Buyer Personas

A few main types of buyer personas we have identified include ‘vape shop owners’, ‘business opportunists’, ‘frequent vapers’, and ‘beginner vapers’. But this doesn’t say a lot to you, or at least it shouldn’t. Having similar business models doesn’t necessarily mean that our clients are the same, or even similar at all.

But how can you identify who your buyer personas are? We’ve put together a shortlist of questions you can answer (or have your clients answer them) to identify them and custom categorize them to your business specifically:

B2B Client Questionnaire

1. What industry do they work in?
2. What size is their business?
3. What are their day-to-day responsibilities?
4. What is ‘success’ to your customer?
5. What position do they hold?
6. Who do they report to?
7. Are they looking for ejuice, nic salts, or disposables?

User-Oriented Questionnaire

1. What blogs, magazines, or websites do they look to for information?
2. What social media platforms do they use?
3. What features/characteristics interest them the most in a vape product?
4. Are they looking for ejuice, nic salts, or disposables?

After you have completed this questionnaire, you must define the following:

1. Who your buyer persona is (give them a name).
2. What motivates your buyers to make a purchase?
3. How you should communicate with them (which platforms you should use).

Final Thoughts

Identifying your buyer personas will allow you to mold your marketing and sales strategies in a way that actually motivates clients to make a purchase. By reading above, you’ll understand what a buyer persona is, how you can identify yours, and how you can use these personas to push your business forward.

Once you’ve defined your personas, you’ll need to have products you can market to them. Register for a wholesale account with VapeRanger and get access to one of the largest wholesale vape product lineups online.