Why Buyer Personas Should Be at the Heart of Your Marketing Strategy

Marketers tend to think they know their prospects, but how well do they know them really?

With the increasing role of marketing automation and a global pandemic in play, the reality is that most companies are getting farther away from their customers and prospects, not closer, meaning we don’t know them as well as we should. When this happens, marketers are simply talking at their audience without really knowing who they are and what they need or want.

Think of it this way: If you were on a first date with someone and all they did was talk about themselves without asking anything about you, would you be interested in going out again? Probably not. When companies take this approach, it can be like someone who never gets to know the person they are dating and then is surprised when they decline their marriage proposal.

Get to Know Your Audience with Buyer Personas

By creating accurate and authentic buyer personas, marketers can begin to appeal to sales prospects in a more personal and impactful way.

In simplest terms, a buyer persona is an archetype that represents those most likely to use a brand, product, or service. Just as book authors must flesh out the characters they create—understanding their hopes, fears, and challenges—creators of buyer personas must get to know their prospective customers in terms of their job roles, responsibilities, pain points, and motivations. Buyer personas should also reveal the thought process of the prospect at each stage in the buying journey.

When executed properly, such personas help to focus marketing and sales efforts, including the creation of more relevant messaging. To this end:

• Eighty-two percent of companies indicated that using personas improved their value proposition.
• Companies that exceed lead and revenue goals are two times more likely to create personas than companies that miss those goals.

Importantly, creating personas also helps prospective buyers to feel understood. Think about your best relationships with others. Chances are that you know their interests, likes, and personal challenges, and they know and understand yours.

When marketing content reflects a company’s understanding of the buyer, it becomes exponentially more relevant and effective.

How to Create Buyer Personas

One of the best ways for marketers to start building personas is to engage with the customer- and prospect-facing members of their team. These include salespeople (both inside and outside), customer service reps, and those responsible for customer success—essentially, the people who deal directly with prospects and customers daily and therefore get to know them the most. These folks can provide a wealth of information about your audience, from common pain points and decision-making factors to buying hesitations. They can also help put a “face” to the prospective buyer in terms of demographics and more.

Web analytics is also a way to track and better understand the prospects who come to your website. Such analytics do more than measure site traffic—they can also tell where your visitors are coming from and the content they’re interacting with most often.

Finally, if you can form one, focus groups that include customers and/or prospects are an excellent way to start building a composite of “who” your target is. In our current era of social distancing, one-on-one phone interviews, group videoconferencing, and email surveys are ways to gain intelligence from consenting parties without getting everyone in the same room.

Buyer Personas are an Essential Component of the Marketing Toolbox

Creating buyer personas is a step you don’t want to skip if your goal is to better align your marketing content to who your prospects are and what they want most.

If you’re looking for assistance in creating a persona, or even multiple personas across different market segments, we can help. Carabiner Communications is adept at building buyer personas and putting them into practice to deliver the right messages to the right buyers at the right time of the buying cycle, leading to greater sales performance.

Let’s talk today.