If you haven’t considered your buyer personas, then how are you going to produce engaging content that is useful to them?
If you aren’t exactly familiar with this term, we will quickly catch you up to speed. By de or even if you are, we'll quickly review what exactly defines a buyer persona.
By definition, buyer personas are fictional characters who represent a brand's ideal customers. It's common for businesses to have more than one ideal customer, and for that customer to change depending on the growth or goals of the business.
Creating buyer personas can take a lot of time, but the process has been proven to improve your company's marketing results. Here are some of our best practices for creating and using buyer personas in your inbound marketing.
The most successful buyer personas are often based on market research and interviews of your actual customers. Depending on the size of your business, you could have between one and twenty personas! Your company should attempt to develop a formal development process to uncover the decision process for each of your buyer personas.
You may want to consider negative buyer personas as well. Negative buyer personas are representations of the people you do not want as customers. By including undesirable personas (i.e. people with lack of budget for your product or service) in your process, you will be able to segment out these bad prospects from the rest of your contacts. This can help you maintain a lower cost-per-lead ratio.
Buyer personas allow you to plan ahead and create highly targeted content to be delivered to your prospects at the right stage in the buyer’s journey. For this to be successful, you need to keep in mind how far along a person is in your sales cycle. For example, if your buyer persona is the owner of a generator retailer, you would create a series of offers for that persona to target his or her needs during the awareness, consideration, and decision stages of the buying process.
Once you understand the personality, values, opinions, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles of your buyer personas, you can use this information to customize your lead generation forms. For example, if your personas vary based on company size or work in a particular industry, ask each lead for information about company size and industry on your forms.
Buyer personas can be used to ensure any content you create is focused around the goals, pain points and interests of your target audience. A company with inbound marketing expertise can be especially helpful with developing marketing personas because they are usually already familiar with personas relevant to your industry.
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