It’s the first rule of public speaking — and it also applies to digital marketing. It’s a lot easier to get a sense of who you’re talking to when they’re right in front of you. It’s more difficult when you’re behind a screen.
When it comes to creating marketing messages, it can feel like a gamble. You might end up getting your message in front of people who don’t connect with your brand, product or offer. As a small business owner, you don’t have the time or money to leave your strategy to chance so knowing your audience is an important first step.
Create Buyer Personas From Existing Data
Many marketers create “buyer personas” to understand their audience and focus their marketing efforts. A buyer persona is a targeted user profile that highlights the specific interests, needs, challenges and fears of different segments within your target market. These personas can be comprised of like-minded people, those living in close geographical proximity to each other, individuals of a given age range, or those who fit any other information relevant to their decisions to buy your product or service.
With detailed customer personas, you can more easily envision who you’re speaking to through your marketing and, therefore, more naturally target them with a message that resonates with them. That means you can open up a conversation that is relevant to them and help them find solutions, such as your product or service, to the problems they may be facing. Customer personas make the process of message development easier by pre-defining your segments and highlighting their problems or interests.
Personas Work
Russ Henneberry of DigitalMarketer puts it plainly when he says, “Understanding your ideal customer’s decision-making process is paramount to the success of your marketing and sales campaigns.” According to Adele Revella of the Buyer Persona Institute, after you create and implement buyer personas in your business “you will have clear guidance for the decisions you need to make to win their [your leads’] business.”
To bring this into perspective, data shows that behaviorally targeted ads are twice as effective as non-targeted ads. Buyers are 48% more likely to consider solution-providers that personalize their marketing to address their specific business issues. Take Adobe, for example. They saw a 10% increase in email orders, a decrease of 78% in time to market, 59% increase in web visitors and 53% increase in web revenue with persona-based launches.
The Benefits of Buyer Personas
If customers feel their preferences are respected and known, they will be much more likely to buy from you and stick around despite the many other choices in the market.
Creating buyer personas is one of the best ways to connect with your audience, and after implementing them you’ll also have:
- Insight into buying behaviors of customers so you can tailor content to get more leads buying your product or service
- Higher quality lead generation in general so you stop wasting time on leads who aren’t ready to buy and spend that time more efficiently with those who are ready
- Highly targeted funnels to instill trust and strengthen customer relationships so you can retain more leads and customers as lifelong users
- The ability to tailor your marketing messages so you can get the best response at every touch point in the customer buying cycle
- Improvement in the quality and quantity of conversations with your customers by bringing in high-valued prospects so you and your sales team can become more efficient and productive with your time
If you want a better idea of how to create buyer personas for your business, check out our Finding Your Buyer Personas worksheet to work through the process step by step.
