Create Buyer Personas to increase brand engagement
What is the most important part of your business? I would argue it is your customers. Without customers, you wouldn’t have a business, which would mean there would be no problems to solve with your products in the first place.
This is why Marketers and Business Strategists are advised to spend time and use various resources to develop a better understanding of how your customers are thinking. One way of doing it is by using a Marketing Persona – a tool that can help you create fresh and relevant content for your audience. By creating highly valuable content, that is targeted towards your buyers, you will contribute to higher engagement and a successful inbound lead generation strategy.
What is a Marketing or Buyer Persona?
A Marketing Persona (also called Buyer or Target Persona) is a model that describes your typical or target customer, based on detailed audience research.
The idea is to put yourself in your audience's shoes and create a profile of your ideal customer as if he or she were a real person. This allows you to craft targeted marketing messages to them. These messages should use the right tone of voice and address the specific needs and desires of your customer.
Marketing Personas represent ideal prospects and dream customers for your business, that you are trying to attract. They are the ones the entire lead generation strategy is focused towards.
How to create a Marketing Persona?
Although, the information you want to collect about your Marketing Personas varies with every business, the Marketing Persona goes beyond demographics and psychographics. It focuses more on the target market, buying process and three key elements:
- Jobs
- Pain points
- Dreams
The information should be carefully collected through interviews with prospects and current clients, research (using customer surveys or search), or through surveying your internal sales team. When you understand their buying process and speak to their pains and gains, you can engage with them in each phase through your marketing efforts until they’re ready to purchase.
1. Jobs
"Jobs" describes what a specific Marketing Persona is trying to get done in their role. This could be tasks they’re trying to complete, problems they’re trying to solve, strategic areas of responsibility or wants or needs they’re trying to satisfy in their organisations.
2. Pain points (Pains)
"Pains" are all the negative emotions, undesired costs or situations, and risks the Persona (could) experience before, during, or after getting the job done.
3. Dreams
"Dreams" are the benefits the customer expects, as well as desires or would be surprised by. These can be considered value added bonuses. This includes functional utility, social gains, positive emotios, cost and time savings etc.
Guide your marketing with your Personas
It is extremely important to include all three of the key elements in your Marketing Persona. Jobs allow you to understand Marketing Persona daily tasks and adjust your product/service offering to that. Addressing the pain points in your marketing will help you attract their attention, and create an impression, that you a) really know what they struggle with daily, b) can help them solve these troubles by your service/product. Being smart about choosing what pains to talk about allows you to show relevance and true empathy. At the same time, creating marketing campaigns around dreams adds positivity to your messages and inspire your target prospects.
There are many activities where having Marketing Personas created makes a Marketer's life easier. Here are just a few examples:
- Creating marketing and sales strategy: when deciding overall new business sales and marketing strategies it is important to remember who you want to help and how you are going to help them.
- Prioritising initiatives: Marketing Personas help you understand what entices certain buyers to invest in solutions like yours, and what is different about buyers who are satisfied with the status quo. This will allow you to prioritise certain brand and product qualities in your messaging over others.
- Searching for inspiration for marketing activities: You may create a blog and then adjust it to make it interesting for one or a couple of your Marketing Personas. Alternatively, you might start with your Marketing Persona’s pains and dreams’ research, to find inspiration for what topics and activities you should be targeting.
- KPIs and measurement: Having outlined key Marketing Personas within your overall audience will help you be more realistic about your performance. For instance, an action from Marketing Persona (your target customer) should be valued higher than engagement from general audience and brand enthusiasts.
Marketing Personas are a very powerful tool to adjust your entire marketing strategy. At the end of the day, you might end up with more than one Marketing Persona. That is absolutely fine and a more accurate scenario. Having just one persona may be too narrow. At Arekibo we work with 3-4 Marketing Personas but the final number is eventually up to you. Finally, it is important that you document the Personas and share this document with all the relevant stakeholders involved.
You may also be interesting in talking to your UX or design teams about design personas to help you better understand your customers.
Contact us if you would like to create Marketing Personas to increase digital engagement for your brand, or learn more about our digital strategy expertise in practice.