How to Create Buyer Personas to your Inbound Marketing Campaign?

   

         Buyer Personas (also called as reader persona or reader profile for blogger) are fictional and  powerful. Buyer personas can help you to fill the sales funnel with qualified leads and retain the customers. They are research based, modeled representations of who are the buyers, what they try to accomplish, what are their goals, how they think, how they buy and why they make buying decisions etc.,

          The persona is a crucial tool for defining, understanding and reaching your target audience. If you are very narrow to your target audience, the easier the work will be. Suppose your target audience is small eCommerce business, you can now come up with blog post ideas that eCommerce businesses might be interested in. The smaller the target audience, the more focused marketing can be. Once you have identified the trends they encounter and what the implications are, you can build affinity and create a real connection. 

         The key element of the inbound marketing campaign is the concept of buyer persona, which are created to help us to see our product or service from the perspective of the ideal customer. Knowing your buyer persona and understanding the way they consume content, behave and make decisions will help you to create content that speaks to them for the purchase of a product or service.

Importance of Buyer Personas in your Business:

      Personas are a great marketing tool and has lots of benefits

1. Personas help you target your content with laser focus. It is talking one-on-one instead of trying to shout out in a crowd

2. In doing the persona research, you can discover the best website and social media platform and places where your ideal customers are. So you know exactly where to market.

3. Personas can be used to segment your audience and create personalized content for each segment.

     Below are the questions to be asked in your customer support team to build or enhance buyer persona as well as to use the responses to craft the content for your marketing projects like,   

      * What questions receive from prospects? 

              May be they wanted to know about support model, or how your product or service has benefited to them Or they concerned about the warranty

      * What skills your customer need to purchase our product? 

              By identifying the missing skills on the front end, you can better detail your buyer personas. Also, you can address those front end challenges in your content.  

      * What the existing customers are saying? 

              Buyers have some specific questions based on their experience. You can build a buyer persona on what those who have bought still want to know.

      * What internal content is used to help your work?

              Use internal FAQ's to create relevant content on your blog which will be the perfect venue to deliver the support that engages your customers.             

Details to be included in Buyer Personas: 

 1. Industry job title and Responsibility

 2. Level of experience and Technical expertise

 3. Preferred content formats (blog post, infographics etc.)  and social media networks

 4. Typical buyer's journey, what questions they are asking, challenges faced and common objections

 5. Demographics like age, gender, nationality etc.,

Use this tool to create your buyer personas for your business.

For the buyer personas be useful, they need to accurately reflect your real audience. Here are methods to collect the data like,

    1. Use Google Analytics or other Service: In the analytics, the general audience demographics can put you on the right path to building accurate persona.

   2. Survey information through an email list, clients or customers will provide the complete information of your persona.

Buyer Personas in Creating Content: 

    * When you create a blog post idea, pull out the personas for the inspiration. If you keep in touch with your customer about their challenges and questions, you have the plenty of material for your blog posts.

   * When you are writing the blog post, keep in mind with buyer persona to be chatting with or writing the letter to the specific person.

   * Write your home page, about page, contact page etc., with what your persona wants to see there and how you can answer their questions and start building the relationship with your web content.

   * Brainstorm the content with infographic, ebook, podcast etc. What topics would they find helpful and relevant? Will your persona help you find out?

  

Things to be avoided when creating Buyer Personas: 

1. Buyer persona should be very Narrow, not Broad: If you cast too wide, it's very difficult to create content that has a level of personalization necessary to be attractive to your ideal audience.

2. Not assuming Perspective of  Customer & Problems: Put your effort in the context of your customer and their problems to the product and solution.

3. Avoid too many personas : If there are too many personas, the process of crafting the focused campaign becomes more difficult

4. Create a Realistic Persona: When creating the persona, make sure that they are ideal and realistic and that the products will be instantly valuable to them

5. Hyper focused on Product: Create content that educates your customer on your company area of expertise to help them become more informed business people in general.