If you’re a seasoned marketer, you’ve heard about buyer personas at one point or another. But, with so much talk about personas, it was surprising to learn that most professionals believe personas are a nice-to-have, instead of a must-have. We get it. Sometimes a launch date comes up quicker than expected and your boss needs a marketing plan yesterday. When this happens, marketers often overlook identifying a target audience and jump straight into deliverables.
But to ensure you get your ideal customer engaging with your content or campaign and you get the most sales conversions possible, it’s critical to define and identify buyer personas ahead of launching a new marketing initiative. In this blog, we use a snippet from How to Create Buyer and Use Personas to discuss personas and how to use them to achieve your sales goals.
Defining Personas
Personas are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers. They help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) better, and make it easier for you to tailor content to the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of different groups. Depending on your business, you could have as few as one or two personas, or as many as 10 or 20.
How to Use Personas
At the most basic level, personas allow you to personalize or target your marketing for different segments of your audience.
For example, instead of sending the same lead nurturing emails to everyone in your database, you can segment by buyer persona and tailor your messaging according to what you know about those different personas.
If advertising in Google and Facebook, you can use personas to promote a product or service to audiences that match similar interests and behaviors.
If you take the time to create negative personas, you’ll have the added advantage of being able to segment out the “bad apples” from the rest of your contacts, which can help you achieve a lower cost-per-lead and cost-per-customer (and see higher sales productivity).
Bringing it all together
Establishing buyer personas for your company helps segment your target audience. Segmentation helps you deliver the right content to the right audience, which generates higher engagement, more leads, and helps get you closer to achieving your sales goals.
Know that when you don’t consider personas in marketing or advertising, you cast a wider net than necessary and market to an audience that is less likely to buy from you. This effort costs you time and resources and can get expensive in the long-term, so why bother doing it wrong, when you can do it right?
Ready to start building personas? Download our guide on How to Create and Use Personas and learn how to create your buyer personas from scratch, so you can easily market to your ideal customers and get a great return on your investment.
