In a white paper by Radius called “Creating Buyer Personas” the company suggests that buyer personas, or representations of your ideal customers, are invaluable in shaping an effective marketing strategy. They encompass the personal and demographic characteristics shared among all members of each distinct persona. By learning about your company’s customer archetypes, your marketing team can determine the best ways to target each persona individually, rather than the general audience as a whole.
Buyer personas represent your most valuable customers based on common attributes. They are developed by collecting data from existing customers, prospective customers, and members of your sales and support teams who regularly engage with them.
Knowing what your audience wants is the best way to ensure your marketing content will be well received. By identifying the key characteristics and interests of each buyer persona, your marketing team will be able to create stronger and more targeted content. Each persona should have a distinct strategy based on its common attributes. These commonalities will also help dictate the best con- tent for each group.
Tailoring your marketing strategy for each buyer persona separately will ensure that you are providing each group with the most relevant content that aligns with their common attributes. This is important for both customer acquisition by winning their interest in your product, and for customer retention by keeping them engaged with your brand.
Accurate data will yield the best results when creating each buyer persona. Precise analysis will also lead to more effective marketing campaigns within each group. The optimal strategy involves accurately identifying the recipes of attributes that define your best customers.
In order to find these ideal segments you will need to test, measure, and repeat until you are satisfied. Use a marketing segmentation tool to track your tests and easily view which combinations of attributes perform better than others. This will save time and energy as you analyze the results and begin crafting each buyer persona.
Once you determine the top performers, use the attributes in each case to craft an archetypal customer based on the data. While creating your buyer personas, focus on different types of data points and how you can use data to find the information for which you are looking for.
Prior methods of creating buyer personas involved sending out surveys to a company’s existing customer base with little to no cohort analysis in advance. Now with big data you can make predictions based on attributes, which makes the overall process more intelligent. By using data to make these predictions, you will see better results and can build personas based on the different data types.
After you create and define each buyer persona, you will need to:
- Use persona-specific marketing content versus general marketing content material
- Create individual campaigns for each distinct persona
Marketers should create unique content for each buyer persona because it will make each campaign more effective. Use the data gathered to predict what type of messaging will resonate well with each group given their common characteristics and data points.
Buyer personas are also useful in determining the most effective type of marketing campaign for each group. For example, if one buyer persona includes consistent use of social media channels, Facebook advertisements would likely be an effective marketing strategy to best target and reach the cohort.
So, ask yourself: Who are your buyer personas and are you reaching them?