Every marketing strategy should start by defining buyer personas. They’re what will allow you to create relevant content and ensure results.
Pro Tip: This topic is very popular; we recommend downloading our eBook, “What Is Inbound Marketing?”, which willhelp youwith your buyer persona strategy.
These days, it’s impossible to work at a company—especially in marketing and communications departments—without thinking about your target audience. Whether you’re outlining a strategy or putting together a campaign, writing a brochure or publishing a post on social media, it’s crucial to keep one question in mind: Who is our buyer persona?
Knowing who this person is is key to the success of any marketing and communication effort. It’s very common to talk about a “target audience,” but this is a vague concept. A target audience defines a group of people based on age ranges, areas of interest, and other general characteristics. A buyer persona is a detailed profile of your ideal customer—with a specific age, dreams, problems, ambitions, and even a first name. It is to this person that you must communicate.
See also: The Difference Between Inbound Marketing and Outbound Marketing
Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer and should be built based on market research and real data about your existing customers.
This is clearly a strategic advantage for any business, because by defining who you want to communicate with, where they are (online and offline), and what their interests are, all your communication becomes much more streamlined and targeted. Once you’ve defined your buyer personas, choosing the right communication channel becomes simpler, since you already know where they look for reliable information.
A well-defined buyer persona makesyour communication not only more streamlined but also more effective. In today’s market, it’s crucial to build relationships and initiate personalized conversations with your target audience; ultimately, those who can build and maintain these relationships based on trust and authority come out on top.
See also: The Difference Between Inbound Marketing and Outbound Marketing
The first step in developing your buyer personas is to ask the right questions. Depending on your line of business, your questions may vary, but there’s a set of basic questions you can always follow:
These questions shouldn’t be answered lightly. Of course, if your business is still in its early stages, you’ll have to make some assumptions, but there’s little point in making up data and information. Instead, look up data, market studies, and census reports. Seek out concrete, verified information and gather your own data through interviews and surveys.
Once you’ve gathered all the information and feel you’ve met all the goals for creating your buyer persona, it’s time to put the pieces together and launch your Inbound Marketingstrategy.
See also: The Difference Between Inbound Marketing and Outbound Marketing
For better visualization and to make it more relatable, you can also assign an “avatar” to each buyer persona.
Once you have all the data needed to define your buyer persona, it will be easier to develop a content strategy for your business—one that will positively impact your target audience.
Remember: this process must be a collaborative effort—involve the various departments. Create an executive group with qualified members to assist with this task, and define responsibilities for gathering information. If everyone is involved, you’ll be able to count on their ongoing help in gathering information and creating content.
The entire process of creating content for each stage of the buyer’s journey becomes easier when we already have well-defined buyer personas.
Once you know who your personas are, what their profiles are, and what problems they want to solve, you should determine which topics and types of content they’ll want to consume at each stage of the buying process: awareness, consideration, and decision.
Typically, your buyer persona is in the awareness stage when they haven’t yet clearly identified their problem and are looking for educational content to better define and address it. In the consideration stage, they already know exactly what their problem is and are looking for solutions to resolve it. Finally, they reach the decision stage once they’ve identified the best solution or service for their problem and are looking for the best partner or supplier.
How can you tell which stage your leads are in? Ideally, you’ll already have some demographic and behavioral information about your leads that can give you a good indication of their level of engagement with your brand: they visited a key page on your website, downloaded an eBook, participated in a webinar, filled out a contact request form…
It’s important to define which steps, data points, and/or behaviors correspond to each stage. From there, you can create workflows that will automatically identify which stage each lead is in and provide you with insight into the best approach for your lead nurturing strategy.
Tip: You can (and should) also considerlead scoring based on the level of engagement your leads demonstrate.
Pro Tip: This topic is very popular; we recommend downloading our eBook: What Is Inbound Marketing, which will help you with your buyer persona strategy
Content originally published in June 2014 and revised and updated in 2022.