Buyer Persona Development For Successful Content Marketing

In order to develop a buyer persona, you will need to delve deep into your data to collect information on your existing customers. This information will help you to segment your existing customer base and to create representations of your ideal customers. The kind of information you will use for your buyer personas is the information that allows you to tailor your marketing efforts accordingly. For example, if you notice that 35 percent of your software sales are to clients in the restaurant industry, then one of your main buyer personas should be a decision-maker who works in that industry. With this in mind, the following are some of the questions you will want to answer when developing your buyer personas:

What Are Their Demographics?

Demographics are important because they help give you an idea of how to engage with customers and can also help you pinpoint certain needs and challenges. Age, gender, location, and background are all details that you will want to fill out for your buyer personas.

What Is Their Job Function?

Your buyer personas should include their job title and what kind of responsibilities they have. For example, if a large portion of your customers is marketing directors, then at least one buyer persona should be representative of a marketing director. Other helpful information relevant to their role can include their professional background, their skill set, and their education level.

What Industry Do They Work In?

Customers in different industries have different needs. Take into account what industry your buyer persona works in, how long they’ve worked in that industry, whether their business is B2B or B2C oriented, and what is their yearly revenue.

What Are Their Motivations?

The motivations should include the customer’s goals at their job. For example, if the buyer persona is a marketing manager, then maybe their goal is to grow their company’s user base and to reach their company’s revenue goals.

What Brands Do They Currently Use?

If they are using similar products and services to what you provide (or that are related in some way), then name what brands they are currently using and what they like and dislike about those products and/or services.

What Are Their Challenges?

If the buyer persona is a CIO and you’re selling software, then one of their challenges could be trying to identify new technology that will have a measurable impact on their company.

What Are Their Barriers To Making A Purchase?

Consider how much responsibility the customer has when making a purchasing decision. For example, maybe they need to obtain approval from another person or from an entire committee before they can make a purchase, or maybe they have a limited budget to work with.

What Are Their Personal Preferences?

Personal preferences matter even in a B2B context. These preferences refer to what social media they use, which communication channels they favor, and how they perform research online.

What Are Their Fears?

Fears can include everything from overpaying for a solution, investing in the wrong solution, purchasing a solution that doesn’t work, losing their job as a result of a poor investment, or damaging their reputation.

With the aid of buyer personas, you’ll be able to implement a much more effective marketing strategy. For example, maybe you have a kitchen product that you developed with the everyday consumer in mind. However, it turns out that the majority of your customers are actually restaurants who have found an effective use for your product in their commercial kitchens. If you continue to target consumers who like to cook, you’ll miss out on an entire industry that’s more likely to invest in your product. You risk alienating existing customers and prospects who are actually qualified if your marketing efforts aren’t relevant to them.

Buyer personas help ensure that your marketing strategy is not only successful but cost-effective as well. Some of the specific ways in which well-researched buyer personas can help to inform your marketing strategy include:

Target The Right Prospects

No company wants to waste time trying to engage prospects who have no interest in their products or services. Buyer personas are incredibly useful in that your marketing team can use them to pre-qualify your prospects to make sure you don’t waste time and resources engaging with low-quality leads.

Inform Your Content Creation Strategy

In order for your content marketing strategy to be successful, you need to create content with a specific audience in mind. If you have developed your buyer personas, then you can tailor content that addresses the needs of each persona and increase the chances of attracting and nurturing the right prospects.

Know Where To Find Your Prospects

Knowing where to market your company is just as important as knowing who to market to. Even if you craft a message targeting the right audience, if you deliver that message on the wrong platform, it will fall on deaf ears. Your buyer personas help you identify what channels your prospects prefer.

Segment Your Marketing Campaigns

Buyer personas make it easy to segment your customers as well as your prospects for things like an email marketing campaign. This enables you to send more personalized and relevant content to each persona, which can help you nurture prospects and build stronger relationships with customers over the long run.

Knowing what the specific needs, challenges, and goals of each persona are will help provide you with guidance when it comes to improving your products or developing your services. Even if you’re developing brand new products and/or services, they need to meet the needs of your actual customers. Your buyer personas provide specific details about the needs and challenges that your development team can use to successfully improve or develop products and/or services.

Being able to match customers with your buyer personas will enable your sales team to more effectively engage with those customers and to meet their needs. Without buyer personas, interactions between your sales team and your potential customers will feel more forced and less personal. Your sales team will also be able to validate your personas and provide recommendations on how to fine-tune your personas more effectively as they continue to engage with both potential customers and existing customers.

Buyer personas can help improve your customer service in a couple of ways. First, your customer service reps will have a better idea of what your customers’ values are, making it easier to engage with them. Secondly, you will know the preferred channel of communication of your customers, thereby ensuring that your customer service supports those channels.

Finally, buyer personas allow everyone in your organization to be on the same page. This means that if your customer support team is receiving a lot of feedback about your product or service, they can relay that information more effectively to your product or service development team.

Every organization should be using a CRM (customer relationship management) software. CRM software helps gather all of your customer data across multiple channels, stores it in a centralized location, and organizes it so that it’s easily accessible. This centralized organization of data allows you to pull useful data on your existing customers to develop your buyer personas. This can include information that customers provided via forms as well as data obtained through personal interactions.

Using a variety of analytics tools, you can find out a lot of information about your customers simply by monitoring their behavior on your website or social pages and identifying their preferences. For example, analytics allow you to identify the following:

• How your customers arrived at your website
• What communication channels your customers use to contact you
• What social channels they use most
• What types of content they are engaging with
• What offers they downloaded
• Their purchase history

Social media is a fantastic place to mine data about your customers as well as your prospects, whether it’s through professional accounts, such as LinkedIn accounts, or personal accounts, such as Facebook or Twitter accounts. Most users will fill out a generous amount of information just creating their social media profiles that you can use to help create your buyer personas. This often includes information such as their age, educational background, and more. You can also use a variety of social media listening tools to monitor conversations that focus on problems and challenges that you know your products or services could solve.

You can fill out your buyer personas using the information you weren’t able to access by simply asking your customers directly. This can be done by creating a survey and emailing it to your customers. You can also post surveys on your website or on social media to gather general information about prospects that might be helpful to the creation of your buyer personas as well. Surveys are an excellent way to get information on demographics, goals, and challenges, all of which can be challenging to obtain through existing sources. Just make sure to keep any surveys you use brief or else your customers and prospects will be less willing to take the time to fill them out.

Many of your direct competitors have likely created their own buyer personas. Because they are competing directly with you, chances are many of the details fleshing out their buyer personas will overlap with yours. It’s a good idea to do a little research into who your competition’s buyer personas are by checking out their social media pages and looking into who is following them and engaging with them. This is a particularly useful way to collect information if your business is relatively new and you haven’t built a big social media following yet.

Finally, considering all of the different types of customers you have, a single buyer persona is not likely to suffice. Create enough buyer personas to represent your core group of ideal customers. Of course, this doesn’t mean that every customer should have their own persona -- too many buyer personas will only confuse your marketing and sales personnel.