The old adage, “Know your audience†is just as important today, especially if you need to create a successful marketing campaign. Understanding who your audience is and why they should buy from you is key to crafting a marketing strategy that connects your audience and draws them towards your product or service.
Creating a buyer persona helps you to visualize not just who they are and what they buy, but also why they don’t buy and how you can remedy that. Relating to a persona helps you to focus and target on their needs so that every piece of information you produce along the journey is relevant to them and their situation. Relevance is part of connecting with your perfect customer, and it’s at the core of targeted and meaningful communication.
Never underestimate the power of the buyer persona while you consider this fact - many companies have limited marketing funds, so they have to be used wisely. Marketing budgets do affect considerations for marketing campaigns; however, there is a way to compromise by creating a balance between a budget and a strategy leading to success.
Simply put, having a buyer persona as part of your marketing plans vastly improves your ROI because it helps you to understand your customers better. If you refine the strategy that governs your marketing activities - making it cost effective and customer-focused - both you and your customers will benefit from the experience. By focusing on creating a persona, then designing your campaign around the attributes of that persona, the communication level is brought to a level of clarity where you are able to anticipate how your target customers think and react. Additionally, you’ll be ready with pre-planned pathways to guide them through their buying journey.
Being objective is also a necessary part of the planning process, and creating a buyer persona helps in this regard. Here’s how: effective content is designed for a specific target audience, so it’s necessary that you understand how this segment is going to respond. A buyer persona provides the context for your content and shapes how the information is gathered and presented, allowing you to make better decisions about your marketing message
Though the approach of casting a wide net over your demographic is possible, inevitably the result will be message dilution. When you try to talk to everyone, you end up talking to no one. Your message, in an effort to reach EVERYONE, simply gets less clear, less focused – and less likely to engage. A well-focused campaign using a buyer persona helps to develop a strong brand with a tailored message that reaches your target audience at every touch point of the buying cycle.
Buyer personas provide a blueprint for all of the resources that will be needed to help your customers make a purchase decision. Having your buyer persona as a cohesive common denominator makes it easier to create content – emails, blog posts, events, and more.
Failure is Not an Option
Why do marketing campaigns fail? One of the major reasons is that they have not looked at the strategy from an outside perspective. Though you may have a great idea, your buyer persona may suggest to you that a different approach is better. The benefit of having a good buyer persona is that it helps you ask the right questions of your demographic and also of yourself. If used wisely, it can be a shortcut to success. With a credible buyer persona constructed right from the beginning, you can easily deliver relevant information to your audience. If the message is not relevant, it can be costly – your opt-outs go up and engagement goes down.
It’s not just any buyer persona that you need to create; it has to be an effective buyer persona. You have to really understand your audience or the persona will fail because it is too superficial or it’s just a list of attributes and not an actual representation of your target buyer. Focus, research, and communication are key to getting the buyer persona right to reach the ultimate goal: understanding your customers in order to lead them through your sales funnel effectively.
When is a buyer persona most useful? Personas are best when they bridge the gap between the customers’ anticipated experience on one side and your expectations of those customers on the other side. If you don’t build that bridge or fail to use it, then you may alienate your audience before they have gotten far enough into the buying cycle.
It’s critical to take the time to create a persona for your product or service in order to provide valuable tools that result in successful sales. Buyer personas provide a path for your marketing activities that enables your leads to flow through THEIR buying process. In the end, that’s what will help you increase sales.
