Do you feel like your marketing campaigns are ineffective? No matter how much effort you put in and put out top-notch campaigns, your target audience doesn’t respond? In the end, you spend so much resources on marketing campaigns with low return on investment (ROI).
We are living through ad-intensive times. You’re likely to see between 4,000 and 10,000 ads per day depending on how much time you spend online, where you live, and your line of work. It’s no surprise that consumers trust product recommendations from their loved ones more than ads. Friends and family have no commercial interests when they talk about a product. They also know best how the product will be suited to the prospect’s needs and desires.
It’s becoming harder every day to get your organic marketing campaigns before the right people. As an advertiser, you have to break through a huge amount of online noise to capture your audience’s attention. If you want to create marketing campaigns that are as effective as personal recommendations, then you need to understand the people you’re targeting. You need to build effective buyer personas. It’s the only way to cut above the ad noise and not only reach your target audience but also convince them to become buying customers.
What is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona refers to a detailed description of your target customer. It enables you to document details such as demographics, hobbies, family size, and career history to create a real image of your model customer. The Digital Marketing Institute defines buyer persona as a profile that represents your ideal customer.
Buyer persona is also referred to as audience persona, customer persona, or marketing persona. It enables you to tailor your marketing campaigns to your audience and connect better with them. Creating a buyer persona is an essential element of inbound marketing regardless of the scope of size of your business. It enables you to answer the the following questions:
How do you create marketing campaigns that would generate a response from your target audience?
Which problems or needs are your customers looking to satisfy and how will your business help them?
What type of content would speak to their needs and desires?
How would the customer prefer to be guided through the sales funnel?
Creating a buyer persona is an absolute necessity if you are to put out effective marketing campaigns. Let’s look at how an effective buyer persona can help your business.
Benefits of Creating Buyer Personas
A buyer persona gives you a representation of your target customer. It enables you to create a picture including the intangible elements that make a person tick. It gives you a detailed description of how your target audience looks by embodying the characteristics of your best potential customers. This way, you are able to understand their pain points, shopping patterns, and purchasing goals.
Buyer personas enable you to create marketing campaigns specifically targeted to your target audience. They will guide you on everything including product development, marketing channels to use, and brand voice. While it’s impossible to know every prospective customer individually, creating buyer personas can help you to have each segment of your customer base represented. You may need to create a buyer persona for each segment as different customers might use your products for different purposes.
Many businesses believe that buyer personas are only relevant to the marketing department. But they can help your overall business operations as well. Some of the benefits of creating buyer personas include:
Connect with your customers in the right way: Buyer personas enable you to approach business in a customer-oriented manner. You’ll be able to connect with your customers in the right way, place, and time. Instead of creating unwanted campaigns, you’ll be able to push campaigns that resolve a need. It makes it easier for your customers to find you and access information about your products.
Develop remarkable content: Content marketing is crucial for any online business. The problem is that few businesses know how to develop remarkable content that resonates with their audiences. A buyer persona will enable you to understand your target audience well, hence being able to create content they find useful.
Improve efficiency: Your marketing campaigns and business operations will also become more efficient. Efficient marketing campaigns means reduced wastage of resources and lower customer acquisition costs. Additionally, you’ll be in a position to understand their pain points therefore prepare well on how to overcome their potential objections.
Attract and nurture high quality leads: By helping you identify your target audience’s interests, pain points, preferred content, and communication channels, a buyer persona helps you with lead generation and nurturing. You’ll also be able to create personalized campaigns depending on the lead’s stage on the sales funnel. This means higher conversion rates, more sales, and better revenue generation for your business.
Better product development: Lastly, you will be able to develop products with the customer in mind when you understand how your ideal customer looks. You’ll incorporate product features that suit their needs and pain points. This will not only earn you new customers but also improve your customer retention. It also provides useful insights for eCommerce website design and optimization.
There are many other benefits to creating an effective buyer persona. It’s an absolute necessity for your business. If you are not creating and using buyer personas, then it is time to get started. How do you create an effective buyer persona?
Step-by-Step Guide for Creating Effective Buyer Personas
Are you ready to leverage buyer personas to increase your lead generation and revenues through effective marketing campaigns? Creating a buyer persona requires you to know everything about your target customers so you don’t rely on assumptions. You have to collect and analyze the right data that your business can use. The more information you have, the more detailed and useful your buyer personas are. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to create effective buyer personas:
1. Research about your customers
You will only be able to create effective buyer personas if you understand what makes your customers tick. This is why research is the most important part of the buyer persona creation process. Buyer personas are based on real-life data and not gut instincts.
Some of the details you’ll need to learn about your target customers include age, geographic location, languages, spending habits, purchasing power, hobbies, and stage of life. You should also identify their preferred social media platforms and social media habits. You can get all these details from:
Asking existing customers to take part in surveys
Conducting one-on-one or focus group interviews with the customers
Talking to front-line employees who interact with customers
Relying on analytics from your website and social media platforms
2. Segment your customers
After collecting all the details you need about your customers, the next step is to segment them into different groups. This will enable you to separate buyer personas and have a deeper understanding of your customers instead of targeting a broad audience. You can segment your buyer personas based on:
Pain points
Goals
Interests
Demographics
Levels of income
Purchasing habits, for example, preference for in-store or online shopping
Ensure that you have a system for segmenting your customers so you can tailor your marketing campaigns and channels to the appropriate buyer personas. For example, baby boomers might not respond to a marketing message the same way as millennials even if they have the same pain points.
3. Create a buyer persona template
Next, you’ll need to understand the customers’ journey through the sales funnel for each buyer persona and create a template. You have to understand how each buyer persona behaves at the different points in the sales funnel. This way, you’ll be able to leverage multiple touchpoints to nurture leads and turn prospects into paying customers.
If you want to provide exceptional customer experience and maximize your marketing ROI, then you have to be able to develop a marketing strategy that customers will find engaging at each point of the sales funnel.
4. Understand how you can help
You have created the perfect buyer personas, understand their needs and pain points, and have segmented them accordingly. What do you do now? Develop a clear picture of how you will satisfy their needs and pain points. Some of the key questions you should ask at this point include:
How can our brand and products help the customers?
What are some of the purchasing barriers our customers face and how can we help them overcome them?
What stage of the sales funnel are our customers in?
How can we help them move to the next stage?
Which segment of our customers should we give priority to?
You need to be able to apply your buyer personas to drive business performance. This is where content marketing and PPC campaigns come in.
5. Perform sentiment analysis
Remember that the primary goal of creating buyer personas was so you can develop effective marketing campaigns? Performing sentiment analysis will enable you to process customer feedback about your brand and products. You’ll be able to understand their problems and what they’re most passionate about. Sentiment analysis only enables you to develop even more refined buyer personas.
For your personas to be actionable, you need to:
Keep them updated and relevant. Consumer purchasing needs and habits keep changing so a buyer persona you built three years ago will not be relevant now.
Ask the right questions. For example, knowing a customer’s favorite TV show won’t help with your marketing campaigns.
Ask open-ended questions that enable you to dig deeper into your customers’ motivations
Share the information with your team. Buyer personas are only effective if the entire organization is on the same page and everyone can leverage the information to deliver a customer-centric performance.
How To Use Buyer Personas For Better Marketing Campaigns
According to McKinsey, offering a personalized shopping experience can reduce your marketing costs by up to 20 percent and increase your sales by two percent. Modern consumers aren’t interested in broad mass marketing campaigns. That’s why you are building buyer personas- to humanize your marketing campaigns, connect with consumers on a personal level, and deliver tangible results.
These tips can help you to put your buyer personas to effective use:
1. Classify your prospects by persona from the start
You should classify your prospective customers by persona right from the first interaction. You’ll be able to tailor your marketing campaigns and sales pitch according to their persona. It enables you to engage them in a way they’re likely to convert. You’ll also be able to perform effective retargeting campaigns if they don’t convert the first time.
Some of the questions you can ask to identify which segment of buyer persona a prospect belongs to include:
Which solutions do you expect to get from our products?
What do you consider as your biggest purchasing challenge?
Do you think our products would be able to satisfy your needs?
Which characteristic would you consider most urgent to you?
2. Use CRM to track your leads
If you are not going to track and nurture your leads, then what was the point of investing in buyer personas? You should use marketing automation software such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems to track and nurture your leads through the sales funnel. You’ll be able to identify the most effective marketing campaigns and channels to use to convert your leads. Through a CRM, you can also tell which segment of buyer personas is bringing in more leads and sales.
3. Customize your funnel to different buyer personas
Each buyer has a preferred channel of communication. Some will respond better to social media marketing while others will prefer email marketing. Use this information to create customized sales funnels for different buyer personas. For example, search engine optimization (SEO) and social media can help with buyers who are still at the awareness stage. For those at the purchase stage, product demonstrations can be more effective.
We Are Here To Help…
Buyers personas aren’t only important for target marketing. They also help you to have a better understanding of your customers and how your products are suited to them. Our marketing experts have helped thousands of businesses like yourself and we would love to show you how Salt Marketing could develop buyer personas that skyrocket your conversion rates. Click below for a free consultation with our experts.
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