There’s a lot to do before you can actually start executing inbound marketing activities. You can’t just jump right in and start writing blog entries, creating PPC ads, and posting on social media. Well, you could, but it’d definitely be a mistake. Slow down, take a breath, and focus on developing a strategy first.
One of the most important first steps that you need to take when building your inbound marketing strategy is defining your buyer personas. If this phrase seems completely foreign to you, you’ve come to the right place. Keep reading and you’ll find out what buyer personas are and why your business absolutely needs to define them.
What Are Buyer Personas?
Put simply, a buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer—your target audience. It is based on what you know about your existing customers as well as on market research that you undertake. And it defines, in general terms, what type of person is most likely to buy from your company according to demographic information as well as what type of information this ideal buyer is seeking. It usually encompasses demographic information such as location, income, and age, but other psychographic data as well, such as reasons for buying, interests, and concerns.
They’ll Help You Connect with Customers through Better Content
There’s really no point in spending time, money, and resources on content creation if the blog entries, whitepapers, ebooks, and web pages that you create don’t resonate with your target audience. Your content needs to answer the challenges and questions that your buyer personas have. This is what will make the content useful to them. This is what’s going to make them keep reading.
If you’re just writing in a way that’s focused on selling your business’s stuff or in a way that targets no one in particular, or the wrong customer entirely, you’re not going to be very successful in your content marketing efforts.
When you define your buyer personas, then you get to better understand what matters to your ideal customers, what their pain points are, what their motivations are, and what their challenges are, so you can develop the most valuable and relevant content for them. This will help you better connect with them through your content.
They’ll Help You Segment Your Audience for Effective Targeting
Chances are you don’t just sell to one type of person. You probably sell to a few different types of audiences. Creating buyer personas can give you the specifics that you need to separate your audiences into segments.
This helps you to create as much personalization as possible, which is key to nurturing leads. All of your different types of customers aren’t going to have the same needs, desires, and pain points, so sending out mass emails, for example, to all of your recipients won’t work very effectively. By being able to separate your audiences into smaller segments, you can send out different, personalized emails and messages that are ultra-targeted and personalized, so they’ll resonate more and have a bigger impact. And with the online space more crowded than ever before, you need to stand out from the crowd, so this personalization is critical.
They’ll Help You Become Buyer Focused
In today’s business world, the customer has all of the control in the sales process. As such, your content needs to be buyer focused, your sales process needs to be aligned with the buyer’s journey, and your entire organization needs customer centricity. You’ll be able to outperform your competitors if you start focusing your efforts on your customers’ needs, wants, and desires, instead of your own. But the only way you can do this is if you know more about them—which is why defining your buyer personas is crucial.
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