Persona Driven Marketing – Why (and How) You Should Create Buyer Personas

Shameer Sachdev, CEO and Founder of Growth Gorilla, talks about buyer persona marketing and why it’s a key element of knowing your customer.

Marketers who want to make the most of their budgets (don’t we all) are often tempted to create content that will have the broadest possible reach and appeal. After all, you never know who your next customer might be.

Unfortunately, this strategy rarely yields results, especially for niche products and services. The fact is, you probably do know who your next customer might be – or at least is most likely to be. And your marketing must resonate with that specific individual. That’s where audience personas come in.

Buyer personas are imaginary composite consumers who have all the characteristics of your ideal client, from geographic location to age, income, role, needs and pain points. Personas are often based on your current successful customers, but also on the kinds of clients you aspire to acquire.

Studies showOpens a new window  that persona development coincides with expedited growth across nearly every metric, from click-through rate to email open rate.

Also Read: Losing Customers Before Conversion? Here’s WhyOpens a new window

Persona-driven marketing will make your ideal client literally see themselves in your campaigns. They will sit up and think: “these people are tailor-made for me, and they solve my problems perfectly.”

Creating perfect buyer personas

• Start negative. Many companies start the persona creation process by developing negative buyer personas. These outline the kind of people who, for whatever reason, seem to clog your sales funnel, cost you money, but don’t buy.

Negative personas help narrow down your efforts so you can begin listing positive characteristics, like what are the pain points that your product solves and who faces these issues? Once you know who could potentially benefit, start thinking about your own needs: what kinds of clients have the budget to regularly work with you? Who will generate the most income for your company through one sale or one long-term relationship? You ultimately want to identify customer groups whose goals are aligned with the problems your product can solve.

• Research your competition. Competitive research will help you differentiate yourself from the pack. Look at the tone and attitude of competitive marketing content and product descriptions to discover how or if their audience differs from yours.
• Ask.  A direct customer survey will give you surprising insights into why your product is valuable and what marketing behavior triggered the yes. Have one-on-one conversations with your best customers to glean information on attracting more people like them. And use your social media, email marketing, and web traffic metrics to make audience inferences.
   

Here are some questions to steer your enquiries:

• What are the age, location, attitudes, and life circumstances of your ideal buyer?
• What annoys your ideal buyer in the marketing of various B2B and B2C vendors? What does he or she appreciate?
• What are the issues that come up often in your buyer’s work and how are they currently solved?
• What do they like to read or view online, and why do those forms of media help them?
• How they are accustomed to being treated based on education and career status?
• What are their job responsibilities? Who makes final decisions?
• How do they research and contact vendors or evaluate products they want to purchase? How do they prefer to be reached?
   

Bring the persona to life. Building out a full-blown profile complete with a name, title and even a stock photo image for your persona may seem excessive, but it has practical value. It helps your teams differentiate among similar personas in your target zone and will help them visualize the person they are trying to connect with, ensuring better creative results.

Revise and refine. Your ideal buyer persona should be continually refined as you gather more data and as your business and market change.  Every month and quarter, collect information on which leads yield reliable, repeat business and who does not. Update your personas to ensure your whole team is working from the latest information.

Also Read: How to Drive Customer Engagement With Practical, Seamless Design ElementsOpens a new window

Using Buyer Personas to Guide Marketing

Buyer personas will help clarify which prospects are likely to yield results so you can focus your attention on the leads most likely to convert. Buyer personas will also guide your choice of marketing channel – i.e. Linkedin or Instagram.

Here are a few tips for targeting your perfect persona:

• Take advantage of the advanced targeting tools available within search engines for paid advertising to create target audiences that closely match your buyer persona.
• In your CRM software, track which posts, products, and leads, align with your persona. Your software can help you generate statistics that let you compare how each persona is performing revenue-wise and adjust the lowest-performing personas accordingly.
• Sometimes your persona development efforts will yield more than one profile, and you’ll need to create a buying journey appropriate to each. For example, Blunt Billy may prefer to be asked immediately if he’d like to purchase the product right after downloading your eBook, while Think-About-It Thea will prefer a demo or call.
   

Creating a detailed picture of your perfect potential customer turns faceless marketing into something more personal and engaging; yielding higher results. At the same time, narrowing your focus to channels that perform best and reducing wasted spend on non-converting leads will lower your costs.