Whatever you’re selling, whatever you have to say, you’re looking for someone to hear what you have to say right?
If you’re interested in crafting a successful marketing strategy, you don’t want just anyone to hear you, you want to reach the people who are most likely to be interested in your product or service. Your end goal is to sell.
One of the key elements of a successful marketing strategy is defining your buyer persona.
So what is a buyer persona?
Creating a buyer persona is essentially the outlining of your ideal target audience based on their buyer behaviour. A buyer persona is the modelling of the person you believe is most likely to become your customer.
This psychographic mapping method allows you to narrow down your target audience and properly define it, based on their interests, lifestyle, personality, behaviours and overall demographics. This way, you’re better equipped to understand their needs and how you can help and service them.
Why is it important?
Defining your buyer persona and setting it out, allows all aspects of your business to align with the end goal and how to best serve your customers or customers to be.
This means that all of your departments from sales to marketing to creative are aware of who you’re reaching out, creating consistent and clear communication so as to successfully deliver it to your customer through all of your digital communication channels. In other words, you can make informed strategic decisions as you mould your digital marketing strategy.
It’s equally important to ensure you have the right amount of personas.
You may not necessarily have one buyer persona. Businesses can have several personas since they have different types of customers.
Make sure you don’t over segment by having too many personas but simultaneously ensure that you don’t have so few that you’re excluding key opportunities.
How do you start?
To begin identifying your target audience and building your buyer persona, you need to pinpoint a few key elements.
Once you’ve discovered these points, you need to to see how you fit into your consumers’ lives and how to fill in the gaps for them to cover their needs, become their solution and ease them into making an informed purchasing decision. (source)
Is it truly worth the hassle?
Yes! Studies have shown that B2B companies in particular who have outperformed their competitors, utilized buyer personas and they were an integral part of the plan in doing so. (source)
On digital platforms, defining your buyer persona becomes exceptionally important in understanding not only the consumer and how to reach them, but understanding how they behave across different digital platforms. You could be informing them on one platform but they may be making purchases on another. And that’s key for you to know to maximize your ROI across each and every channel you’re using.
Investing that extra time and effort before kicking off your digital marketing strategy can lay down excellent foundations for a solid understanding of your consumer.
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