How to use buyer personas for entrepreneurs is one of he first things we teach in our entrepreneur marketing workshops on marketing strategy for fintech for instance. It’s a concert that lies at the heart of your marketing being relevant to the audiences you are aiming to attract to your business.
The whole spray and pray method is one of the past.
Today, we have solutions like automation, data, and buyer personas to fall back on.
What Are Buyer Personas?
And How Can They Help Marketers?
Basically, personas ensure that everything you do in terms of lead generation and customer acquisition is tailored to your targeted buyers’ needs.
Think about your company’s current messaging. Is it centred around what you do, or is it focused on how what you do addresses customer needs?
This is where personas come in.
How To Use Buyer Personas for Entrepreneurs
Marketers can use buyer personas to build content strategies that speak directly to their targeted audience, and therefore build trust and reliability with customers.
Additionally, buyer personas help marketers:
- Focus keyword searches
Improve SEO strategies - Refine copywriting
- Aid in the prioritisation of promotional campaigns and activities
This is something we discussed in another article on Digital marketing with Google Ads. The use of personas here is an essential requirement if you want to ensure you get the right message in front of the higher person at the right time.
What about statistics?
- According to a recent study, companies that meet or surpass their lead and revenue objectives are four times more likely to employ buyer personas as demand creation tools.
- Using buyer personas, 56% of businesses have produced higher-quality leads.
- Using buyer personas, 36% of businesses have shortened sales cycles.
- Using buyer personas, 24% of businesses increased lead generation.
- 93% of businesses that surpass their lead and revenue targets divide their database into buyer personas.
An easy and convenient tool for buyer persona analysis is the one created by Hubspot.
Now that we’ve established why you need buyer personas as a marketer, let’s get into the how.
1. Analyse Prospect and Customer Data
We’re talking about profiles of your ideal customer that is a culmination of quantitative research, anecdotal observation, and existing customer data.
When it comes to ideal customer profiles (ICPs), you need more than just firmographic data. A mix between firmographic and technographic data is ideal, as well as any intent data you can collect. This way, you have a well-rounded understanding of who your actual prospects and customers are.
It’s incredibly useful to then identify patterns within your segmented customers.
2. Understand Your Target Market
In order to flesh out your ICP and buyer persona, you have to first understand your target market. If skipped, can result in inaccurate portrayals of your customers. Market targeting allows you to focus your resources and messaging on a specific market that is more likely to buy from you than other markets.
Understanding your target market as a whole allows you to narrow down your individual ideal buyers, and later buyer personas.
3. Align Sales and Marketing
Working collaboratively with sales is imperative to marketing success. Think about it: sales teams are ultimately responsible for transitioning prospects into customers, so their insights and commentary are invaluable.
Consider sales scripts — you can create a set of sales scripts that are tailored to the specific pain points of each of your personas.
4. Talk to Current Customers
Every person will respond differently to messaging and language. It can be really helpful to inquire about what current customers prefer. For example, do they like a casual conversation as opposed to more professional-sounding language?
Once you know what the majority does and doesn’t like, you can try playing around with different approaches to see what resonates most with them.
And the more personalised your message, the more likely it is to resonate with the right people.
So how does this relate to our digital marketing campaigns?
Paid advertising is a great approach to get your content in front of readers while delivering results more quickly than organic efforts.
To answer their demands and successfully target them with your paid efforts, you should have a thorough grasp of your customers. This goes for all of your marketing initiatives. It is crucial for your business to adopt buyer personas, which are fictionalised portrayals of your ideal clients.
However, it is important to remember that your buyer personas can also be used to target specific demographics in your advertising campaigns.
Paid Ads on Social Media Platforms
Buyer personas are ideally suited for sponsored social media audiences since they should comprise demographic, type of company, and behavioural data about your customers.
Company and demographic information
When you have demographic and firmographic data, you can match these to LinkedIn traits.
Targeting Audiences on Linkedin
When seeking to tagget very specific groups of clients, platforms like LinkedIn and, to a lesser extent, Facebook will allow you to filter by job titles and responsibilities. This will hopefully be part of you buyer personas already, as the more you understand about your target market, the more effectively you should be able to target them. You might target someone on the platform who has the position of vice president or director of marketing, for instance, if you have a buyer profile for a marketing leader.
You simply list down all possible job titles using your three or four buyer personas. It’s a great location to start when developing your initial strategy and a great spot to start your campaigns.
Information about behaviour
You can also include behavioural elements while creating your buyer personas, such as the websites they visit, the resources they use, or their regular tasks.
With this knowledge, you can begin speculating about the organisations or communities that they might join on social media sites like LinkedIn and Facebook and adjust your targeting as necessary.
You could periodically miss out on perfect customers because job titles and responsibilities differ from firm to business, according to Mike. “A excellent method to cast a wider net and reach more of your chosen audience is by targeting by group membership.”
Regardless of what their job title or function claims they do, a person’s membership in a group can reveal more about their interests or operational role. Consider targeting by joining LinkedIn groups like B2B Technology Marketing or Digital Marketing, using your marketing leader persona as an example once more.
Growing Your Client Base
In some instances we all understand what it feels like to be over targeted. Our aim with targeting should not be to over target but of course we would want our message to be memorable when it comes to the client looking for a solution which we offer.
The more clearly you can begin to identify your audience, the better. By focusing on the correct audience, you’ll achieve better outcomes even if you don’t reach a large portion of the population.
You may begin extending your targeting by employing lookalike audiences after executing campaigns with your persona audiences. With lookalike audiences, your preferred advertising platform will take the audience you have previously established and expand it based on those they estimate are likely to interact with your ads or hold comparable but not yet identified qualities.
To build a paid advertising strategy and optimise your PPC ad spend, download the Ultimate Paid Search Checklist.
Search and Display Ads
When it comes to paid search, persona-based targeting is more about leveraging them to inform your keywords than it is about creating audiences.
Keywords
You need to make sure that the terms you’re targeting are matched with what their attitude is if your [search] campaign is geared for a particular persona.
You should take into account the difficulties and problems you’ve described for your personas when doing this. What kinds of queries are they entering into search engines? What outcomes are they looking for from their search?
You’ll be better able to research and bid on terms that suit each persona’s particular needs and effectively target them if you take into account the search intent of your personas.
Consider what might happen if your buyer personas were created to represent responsibilities within a similar company: If a person fits the champion persona, your keyword strategy might be more educational or point them in the direction of content that will help them perform their job more effectively. Your keywords for a decision-maker persona might be more geared at the immediate problems they encounter and directing them to your solution.
Specific target audiences
Through Google’s custom intent audiences, you may create more specialised audiences for paid search. Custom intent audiences are created to reach prospects who are actively searching for the goods or services you provide, in contrast to many inbound sponsored campaigns that concentrate on nurturing prospects until they are prepared to make a purchase from you.
These audiences, which include keywords, web pages visited, videos viewed, and purchase behaviour, are what drive ads on the Google Display Network and YouTube video ads.
Utilising Google’s specific intent audience tool.
In essence, you’re constructing a targeting system based on what individuals have recently searched for or what they’re interested in.
Once more, the behavioural data and difficulties you have described in your buyer personas can directly inform these groups.
Utilizing competitor websites in your targeting is another feature of a custom intent audience. If you’ve created buyer personas based on issues and pain areas, you know the answers they’ll be looking for and can add rival companies that provide comparable solutions in an effort to get your brand in front of them.
Success Measurement
How can you be certain that your audiences and your buyer personas are compatible? It really comes down to the calibre of your leads.
There are other metrics to take into account as well, but it’s a strong indication that your ads aren’t reaching the correct demographic if the contacts you’re generating from your paid advertising efforts are frequently being designated as unqualified.
“Your click-through rate is something else to consider. Are people actually clicking on your advertising when they see them? Something may be amiss if you aren’t meeting the bar for your industry.
However, your audience might not actually be the issue. It’s critical to evaluate your promotion of the appropriate deals and ad style when your ads aren’t functioning successfully. In the end, your buyer personas should directly influence every aspect of your campaigns, not simply your audience.
Contact us if you require support with planning or executing your digital marketing campaigns.
