While there are many strategies and tools that support marketing success, one of the most important is buyer personas. After all, what's the point in throwing a bunch of people and money at a marketing project if you haven't even optimized who it's going to target?
Identifying your ideal customer is critical to running a successful campaign. It should be the starting point of any brainstorm session with your team.
So, why spend so much time mapping out the different buyer personas that your industry has? We've got 5 reasons for that...
5 Reasons Every Marketing Campaign Needs a Buyer Persona
1. Deepen Insights
Buyer personas go beyond conventional target market categories (e.g. “enterprise customers” or “first-time buyers”), and shed light on who customers really are, what goals they want to accomplish, and what problems they want to overcome. These insights can be used to inform sales and marketing campaigns, and make them much more effective.
2. Target Attention
Buyer personas help businesses efficiently allocate resources by focusing on more profitable buyer personas. This doesn’t mean that other buyer persona groups are neglected or abandoned. Rather, it means that they receive a small overall piece of the pie – which makes sense.
3. Influence Strategy
Buyer personas influence content strategy, as they help businesses identify what they need to say to certain customers, when they need to say it, and how they need to say it. For example, businesses can build blog post editorial calendars or a series of eBooks from information gleaned via the buyer persona development process.
4. Increase Collaboration
Buyer personas function as a kind of “universal language” that brings marketing and sales teams together, and aligns them as part of a shared strategic framework. For example, marketing teams can analyze buyer personas to identify key pain points that their brand story needs to address, while sales teams can analyze buyer personas to anticipate key objections that customers will have – and be fully prepared to overcome them.
5. Maintain Focus
Buyer personas serve as clear, constant reminders to businesses that they are never “talking to themselves” through their marketing and sales material. Rather, they are always trying to spark or evolve a dialogue with their customers and community. This is an incredibly useful function of buyer personas, since it prevents businesses from losing perspective and forgetting that their external communications are always and entirely about their customers.
The Bottom Line
Buyer personas are vital tools that calibrate marketing and sales campaigns, align efforts between cross-functioning teams (e.g. marketing, sales, design, analytics, research, customer service, professional services, etc.), and most importantly: generate more customers, revenues and profits.
Learn More
To learn more about developing buyer personas that align with your unique offerings and brand, contact the Leap Clixx team today. We’ll work closely with you to identify who you need to reach, and then put the cost-effective strategies, tools, tactics and assets in place to help you reach them.
Topics: Inbound Marketing
