Buyer personas are essential elements in all successful marketing efforts.
Huh? you might be thinking. Buyer what? Buyer who? Or you might be thinking, I know who my customers are. I have a CRM and I know the demographics of my target audience. What more could I possibly need?
A growing trend among savvy marketers is the use of buyer personas. A persona is a written, first-person depiction of a potential buyer or customer. The depiction is of a fictional, but realistic character or characters who represents the types of customers who most likely purchase your products or services. If you utilize the concept and planning that come with forming a buyer persona, you will embrace a new kind of marketing strategy with a stronger directive.
“Prospects who receive messaging personalized to their needs and purchase-readiness convert at a much higher rate. Predefined personas enable marketers to use marketing automation technology to scale personalized communications,” says Kevin Krason, president of Biznet Digital.
Creating the Persona
Personas put a personal human face on otherwise abstract data about customers. By thinking about the needs of a particular person, rather than a broad demographic, your marketing team is able to produce content that better addresses the needs of real customers.
Benefits of Persona Marketing
Personas are beneficial in many ways. For one, they can serve as a template upon which you base your marketing strategy. A persona doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be as simple as a few bullet points describing the desired prospect and the pain points they experience. With these main points, you can market as if you are selling directly to that person. It’s as if the customer or prospect is standing right in front of you.
Examples of Personas:
- Tim is the CEO and owner of a small engineering firm in Michigan. He has no marketing staff and very little time personally to devote to his marketing efforts. He would like some guidance developing strategies and measuring performance for his marketing efforts.
- Linda, a new business owner, is looking to get her business noticed, but doesn’t know what strategies to use and where to best market her products and services. She also doesn’t know much about websites and needs help creating a more customer-centered site.
- John, the director of marketing at a large company, is struggling to find ways to market his company’s products and services. He is looking to partner with a marketing agency to discover new ways to get his company noticed, learn more about social media, and implement Marketing Automation.
The Importance of Personas
Understanding your target market is the most important knowledge for any business. All marketer use demographics to understand their audience. But demographics provide a macro-level, aggregate view. Effective marketing, whether it’s B2B or B2C, takes place on a personal level. Personas allow you to do this. They give you micro-level insight into the flesh-and-blood people who buy and use your products.
Personas help because:
- They provide marketing team members a specific, consistent understanding of various audience groups.
- Data about the groups can be put in a proper context and understood and remembered in coherent stories.
- Proposed solutions can be guided by how well they meet the needs of individual user personas.
- They put a human face on abstract demographics.
Who Uses Personas?
With marketing becoming more personalized, personas are taking on greater importance. Many marketers plan to make persona strategies a bigger part of the tactics they use to market their company.
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