As “busy” and knowledgeable online marketers, we usually like skipping this part. We assume we already know our target market, and we find no value in really diving into the nitty gritties of our buyer personas. We then end up focusing on the wrong targets, being too ambitious, and creating content that are loosely tied up.
We should know. We have been publishing content here for 3 years now, and while our posts do get a significant amount of traffic, it wasn’t until this year that we realized how important it is to attract the right traffic more than just aiming for vanity metrics.
And thus the need for us to establish buyer personas.
And for you too.
Buyer Personas, Defined
HubSpot defines a buyer persona as “a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.”
With buyer personas, you should be able to provide a name, face, or background to the people you want to create content for to achieve your business goals. You want to answer their questions, provide solutions to their actual problems, help them in their daily challenges, and help improve the way they do their jobs or their businesses.
We couldn’t stress enough how important creating buyer personas are in coming up with an intentional content strategy. So let’s dive into this topic today.
Know Your Buyer Personas
In creating buyer personas, you want to identify the following:
- personal demographics
- company credentials
- professional and business goals
- family and life goals
- interests and lifestyle
- online behavior
- buying patterns
- challenges and questions
Practically anything that will give you information on how to tailor content for them.
Experts recommend making at least three to five personas to make a good representation of your audience—one that is neither too broad to cover the entirety of your customers nor too small to be lacking in value.
Knowing your buyer personas is an important step you need to take so that you don’t go groping in the dark with your marketing efforts, incessantly wondering how to approach your audience with your marketing message.
These five things happen when you know your buyer personas:
1. You achieve your marketing goals with more efficiency.
Imagine the amount of time, money and effort it takes to publish a blog, create ads, promote content, engage in social media, among other things. When you know your buyer personas, you become more efficient with your investment, focusing only on content that are absolutely valuable to your target audience.
Having a clear image of your personas whenever you set out to create your marketing campaigns can help in keeping your messaging consistent.
2. You can customize your marketing campaigns more accurately.
Part of your personas’ sketch should include details about their work, their position in the company, and what their responsibilities are. With these bits and pieces of information, you’ll find ease in deciding their level of familiarity with the content you’re offering, and anything that does not apply to them can go right out the window.
3. You know where to promote your content.
Promotion is an important aspect of content marketing, and knowing your personas doesn’t only help you in creating content, it guides you in deciding where to promote them also.
Say, if you created technical content specifically for online marketers and businesses, you know you’ll get more mileage and targeted traffic in Twitter and Linkedin than in, say, Pinterest or Instagram. Knowing where your buyer personas hang out lets you know where to find them.
4. You elicit more response from your audience.
As you get to know your buyer personas, you become better equipped at delivering personalized messages to them. This practice is likely to go unnoticed among your target market, and instead is bound to succeed in terms of response rate.
In addition, personalized messaging can help you reap the benefits when it comes to saving time for your sales lead generation efforts.
5. You can respond to your audience’s needs better and more promptly.
Your personas can ultimately guide you about their most common problems or questions, and in effect, you are always a step ahead in finding exactly what they’re looking for.
By focusing on your buyer personas, the rest of your audience is positively impacted as well. It helps content marketing strategists relate to audiences on a more personal level, gain their trust and eventually lead them further down the sales funnel.
