Buyer Personas: Improve Your Marketing Strategy

Are you marketing to the right people? When someone searches online for a product or service, can you anticipate the answer to the particular buyer persona? What is a buyer persona? It is an example or the profile of an ideal customer who uses your product or service. The personas can help you understand what your customers are thinking, feeling, expecting and planning.

A buyer’s persona is deemed necessary as a tool for marketing strategy right from B2B to consumer markets, in helping to accommodate customers’ needs and best interests.  It is essential for marketers to create effective and successful marketing to attract potential customers. Buyer personas can shape the content creation in a relevant medium to target audiences in a strategic way.

Buyer’s persona is a cornerstone of the inbound marketing methodology. It can help you to focus on who your buyers are, what goals drive their behaviour, when they’re buying, where they are buying and more.  Customers are becoming savvier these days; comparing products based on reviews or recommendations. Customers shift to online research and purchases have further increased the importance of building a buyer’s persona. Buyer personas help marketers to shape the content to target these relevant audiences.

If you are a marketer for a travel agency, you might have three buyer personas: a millennial couple, a corporate business traveller and a family. As a marketer, you need to know what the ideal customer will inquire before making that purchase? The best practice is to ask questions like ‘What would a millennial couple ask about Package X?’ or ‘How does Corporate Service Y appeal to the corporate business traveller?’

How you do you keep up to date on the actual profile of today’s consumers? Market research is one of the best methods to build a buyer’s persona. Example of these methods includes surveys, interviews and focus groups. Focus on both demographics and psychographics. Demographics provide insights into a target group such as gender, ethnicity or designation. On the hand, psychographics delves on the study of lifestyle, opinions and personality. The psychographic profile is useful for marketing and advertising segmentation.

The most component of the buyer’s journey is demographics and psychographics. Understanding these components will help you sail further in the marketing game. Take the smart route to accomplish your marketing goals. Instead of sending lead nurturing emails to your contacts, you can segment the recipients by the buyer persona and tailor your marketing messaging to suit their needs. The marketing message can be adapted and targeted to the relevant buyer.

In order to effectively market to the travel community, the content for the specific audience has to match the buyer’s persona. For the millennial traveller, you might have an article that talks about the best budget beach holidays in Asia. The messaging, as well as the context of the article, must be tailored so that it is relevant to the millennial traveller. As an example, I would create a service offering statement such as, “Creating Authentic Holiday Experiences” for the millennial travellers. An idea for the elevator pitch will be, “We bring you an intuitive travel service that provides you with value and once-in-a-lifetime experience”. These examples will resonate with the millennial travellers since their buyer persona indicates that they prefer authentic, value and adventurous experiences.

Putting together a buyer persona takes time, patience, and perseverance. It is useful to put together an inbound marketing plan, which includes a buyer persona.  If you are a business owner or a marketer, you may consider downloading the free template from Hubspot. The marketing toolkit provides complete detail on how to set your own buyer persona. It also enables marketers to sharpen their content skills with relevant keywords, effective tactics and refined content. Overall, the buyer persona is the smarter way to understand your customers by focusing on their needs while boosting your marketing efforts.