If you haven’t established buyer personas for your business, then you might be wasting valuable time and marketing resources. Buyer personas are your secret weapon for successful market segmentation that can boost sales, drive traffic and convert leads into loyal, repeat customers and brand advocates.
What’s a Buyer Persona?
A persona is a fictional representation of your ideal target customer (or groups of customers) according to market research and many things you probably already know. Bring the personality, characteristics and purchasing power of your target audience to life by establishing buyer “personas” to tailor and target your marketing efforts.
Create Buyer Personas
Personas aren’t based on a single statistic – they’re a collective representation of internal and external research, including:
- Audits of consumer demographic data.
- Research on the browsing and buying habits of your clientele.
- Focus groups.
- Interviews with your sales or field team who communicate one-on-one with your customers the most.
- Sales reports.
- Website and social media analytics.
- Customer reviews, questionnaires and interviews.
At the end of this process, you might identify anywhere from two to 20 buyer personas. Having more or less isn’t better or worse; it just depends on your products, services and customer reach.
Once you divide your ideal customers into groups, create an actual personality to represent each one that includes the following:
- Name — yes, actually make up a name and even pick a photo.
- Demographic and psychographic data, including education and income level.
- Shopping and buying behavior.
- Personal interests and hobbies.
- Career, including role, responsibilities, and challenges — if your sales are B2B, include data like industry and revenue.
- A quote from a customer who fits that persona.
- Description of social media and internet habits.
- Pain points and barriers to purchase.
- Persona-specific calls to action.
Buyer personas help you better understand your customers’ motivation and behavior with respect to your products and services. And you can use that information to create highly targeted marketing strategies.
How to Use Personas
After fleshing out your buyer personas, identify their specific needs and craft custom messaging around how you can help them. Align this messaging across all touchpoints to communicate your brand story and establish a seamless customer journey. These touchpoints include but are not limited to:
- Sales outreach strategies.
- Channel marketing.
- Blogs and website content production.
- Direct mail campaigns.
- Partnerships with influencers or celebrities.
- Email marketing efforts.
- Video creation.
- Website and landing pages.
- Social media content and promotion.
- Print advertising and PPC campaigns.
- New product development.
Your customers will likely change over time — the pandemic may have already taught you that. To make sure that you’re always speaking to your ideal customer, update your buyer personas yearly, at minimum — or whenever there’s a significant change in your business or industry. That doesn’t mean that you have to create completely new ones every year, but you should review what’s working and not working.
Benefits of Using Personas
Personalized content saves time and money, converts leads, drives sales and shows customers that you care about their needs. And the proof is in the data. Research has shown that targeted personas helped to boost leads by 124% and generated a 55% increase in organic search traffic. Personas enabled a two- to five-fold increase in website efficacy and ease of use by targeted users.
When it comes to marketing, strive to be a specialist rather than a generalist. A lot of time goes into creating buyer personas, but the effort can return greater success and profit to every segmented marketing campaign that you produce in the future. Contact Kymera today to learn how to develop and execute targeted, persona-based marketing campaigns.
Source
https://www.impactplus.com/blog/the-science-of-buyer-personas-infographic
