Incorporating buyer personas into your marketing strategy is a powerful way to better understand your audience, create personalized content, and boost your sales.
When it comes to marketing, the adage the more you know, the more you grow holds an immense amount of merit—especially when it comes to your ideal customers. Understanding who you’re trying to target cannot only help you tailor your marketing efforts, but also increase your sales. One surefire way to develop a clear understanding of your audience is by creating a buyer persona.
How a buyer persona aids your marketing efforts
HubSpot defines a buyer persona as a “semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.” Ideally, a detailed one will include customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. The more thorough you are, the more effective the persona will be.
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When shopping for the holidays, who is it more challenging to find something for: your best friend or your distant cousin Ernie? More than likely, the latter because you know more about your best friend and have a general understanding of what they want. This same theory can be applied to your customers. It’s harder to sell your products and services to a potential customer you know little about. This is where a buyer persona becomes valuable.
Developing buyer personas will help you better understand your prospective customers. (It is possible to have more than one.) This, in turn, will make it easier for you to tailor your content and messaging. Creating personalized content that resonates with your target audience can lead to more success with your marketing efforts.
How to create a buyer persona
Step 1. Examine your current customers
When developing your customer persona, make sure it reflects your real customers, not just the ideal ones. While it’s tempting to focus on a perfect customer who urgently needs your products or services, if that customer doesn’t actually exist, your targeting won’t be nearly as effective as you’d like. When creating a buyer persona, it’s best to start with the customers you presently serve—they can provide you with a wealth of knowledge. Consider looking through your database to uncover certain trends among different customers.
Step 2. Mine the data you already have
Next, look to the forms and other means you use to capture customer information. Do they draw a picture of your current customers that can inform your understanding of who they are? There is evidence that how much and what kind of information you request affects the likelihood of completing an online sale, but you do need ways to get the data you need to construct as complete a persona as possible.
As at least one company has noted, businesses today pull data from various sources, including website activity, social media, and location data. This allows them to build comprehensive profiles and target ads effectively. As you build trust, consider collecting psychographic data like personality, values, and lifestyle. Interactive marketing campaigns can help you gather this data voluntarily and transparently. At a minimum, strive to get customers’ names and email addresses so that you can continue to market to them.
Step 3. Consult your team
Lastly, talk to your salespeople! They are the frontline to your prospects. See who they’re interacting with the most and what generalizations they can gather from who they speak with daily.
The takeaway
Incorporating buyer personas into your marketing strategy is a powerful way to better understand your audience, create personalized content, and boost your sales. By examining your current customers, mining data, and consulting your team, you can build detailed personas that will help you connect with your target audience more effectively. If you’re to take your marketing efforts to the next level, start creating your buyer personas today and see the difference it makes.
