As a B2B content marketer, I’ve worked on multiple projects involving buyer personas. After all, it’s impossible to convey an offer to ‘someone’ without actually knowing that ‘someone.’
Now, while many brands create buyer personas, most of them don’t actually use them! In fact, only 44% of marketers use buyer personas in their content marketing strategies.
The problem is most organizations spend tons of resource to create personas and just end up leaving them in their closets. It’s more of a ‘checking off the list’ kind of process as opposed to actually putting it to work.
Nevertheless, 47% of brands who exceeded sales and revenue goals consistently maintain their customer personas.
The importance of Personalization in 2019
You see, persona marketing isn’t some fancy schmancy marketing tactic; it is an ongoing process of knowing your customer before actually marketing to them.
Moreover, the internet in 2019 is the most crowded place on earth. This means consumers are bombarded with a ton of advertisements. So, for brands to stand out, they must go above and beyond to engage with their target customers.
This is where buyer personas come in and offer a unique way of engaging with your target customers. Using a well-developed persona enables you to understand your consumer and ultimately make better decisions.
To help give you a head start in the right direction, I’ve shared several ways to put your buyer personas to good use:
1. Conduct a Persona Training Workshop
The first thing you need to do before you actually use personas is getting your personnel familiar with persona marketing. This is vital towards the successful implementation of your personas.
You can use this time to take feedback and see how your employees react to the personas. This will help with the onboarding process and mitigate any misunderstandings in the future.
2. Segment your customers/clients
Buyer personas give you a ton of information about your most ideal customers. So, use this information to create segmented lists of your existing customers (and also your prospective clients).
Additionally, you can add a few cues on how to act and market with a particular type of client. A sales executive you can use this information to tailor his pitch as per the persona and ultimately increase conversions.
Pro tip: Create handouts of this list and pass it on to all the relevant personnel.
3. Segment out your negative personas
A negative persona is a semi-fictional representation of who you don’t want as a customer. For example, a professional who is too advanced for your service or students looking to engage with your content with zero commercial intent.
Using a buyer persona allows you to segment out your negative person and this helps in increasing conversion rates of your lead generation process.
4. Fix your existing content
Before you jump into churning new content, go over your old content and optimize it. Audit and compare your existing content with your buyer persona and fix the gaps.
You’ll most likely find gaps in the tone and vocabulary of your content. So, edit ruthlessly until you have something that works for your persona.
Note: Updating old content adds to the freshness factor and helps boost Search engine optimization (SEO).
5. Create niche content
Now that you’ve updated your old content, it’s time to created highly segmented content. By this, I mean creating content that targets specific queries your persona would have.
For example, instead of creating a blog post — “10 questions when starting a website” create something more niche and specific to your persona like — “10 questions when starting a website for agencies.”
Highly segmented content oftentimes has less competition and is much easier to rank. Additionally, this content tends to get a higher engagement because the reader intent is usually much higher for long-tail queries.
6. Tailor your copy
Buyer personas help you understand the whys, hows, and what about your target customer. You can use this data to tailor your copy and prepared highly targeted content.
Here are a few ways to tailor your content using buyer personas —
- Use real persona quotes in your landing page copy
- Position your copy around real problems your consumers have
- Offer solutions that your persona actually wants
- Use media that relates to your persona
- Use the same lingo that as your persona
- Consider using customer case studies
For example, Uber perfectly communicates clear benefits that would resonate with a potential Uber driver —
7. Create Dynamic Website content
Now that you have buyer personas, chuck your one-size-fits-all web content and integrate personalization. The goal here is to make your customer feel like you know them on a personal level.
For example, HubSpot uses personalization to tailor its content based on the life cycle of the visitor.
8. Optimize your ad spend
Use your buyer persona to optimize ad spend towards your most ideal customers. This will help increase the efficiency of your marketing and decrease wastage in advertising expenditure.
You should also integrate personal information into your advertising lists and improve the targeting of your advertising.
Conclusion
Buyer personas are the best way to put a face on your customer. It’s as good as using a bullseye to improve your target. So, make sure you use them and take your marketing to the next level.
What is your experience using buyer personas? What method has worked the best for you? Let me know in the comments below.