It sure would be nice if you had a crystal ball to tell you exactly what your audience is thinking.
You could always just ask the magic 8-ball, but wouldn’t it be more effective to come up with a strategy to group your customers based on documented buying trends and personal interests?
Blogger, entrepreneur, and CEO Priscilla McKinney recently partnered with Shweiki Media, a company that offers printing services in San Antonio, TX, to discuss how buyer personas can take the guesswork out of your campaigns.
So What Exactly Are Buyer Personas?
During the podcast, Priscilla described buyer personas as your ideal client profiles, including presumptive personal information regarding your audience’s thoughts and needs. The best ways to capture this information are to ask your customers directly through interviews, surveys, or forms.
However, if you don’t have access to your buyers, you’ll want to work with several departments in your company to make educated hypotheses.
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Buyer Personas Help Determine to Whom You Should be Marketing
Look at your customers as more than just clients. Developing personas can help you find out exactly who your buyers are. What is their day like outside of work? What concerns keep them up at night? What problems do they have that your company or products can solve? Priscilla suggested diving deep into the mindset of your audience, so you can begin to understand them on a human level.
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Buyer Personas Help Determine Where You Should Be Marketing
Just because 2 billion people use Facebook, that doesn’t mean your clients are actively engaging on the social media site. Once you begin to understand what your audience is thinking, you will realize where they go to receive their information.
Priscilla pointed out that this is also a good opportunity to test if your personas back up the information you’ve received from your data. If the numbers don’t align with what you expect from your audience, you could discover opportunities to market in new avenues.
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Buyer Personas Help Determine How You Should Be Marketing
Utilizing the hottest trends isn’t always the best business move for your company. According to Brightcove, nearly 75 percent of consumers admit social media videos influenced their purchasing decisions. But do your customers feel the same? If you determine your audience prefers to receive information with detailed statistics, a whitepaper or infographic might be more effective for this specific customer group.
Don’t Stop at Just One Buyer Persona
Once you’ve developed your first buyer persona, keep going. The more you can segment your audience, the better you’ll be able to target specific groups with content especially for them. It may take some time and revisions, but proper buyer personas should lead to stronger results and improve ROI.
