Why is understanding a buyer persona important?

A buyer persona, commonly known as a customer persona, is a crucial tool in today's marketing world, both in traditional and digital methods. In short, the buyer persona represents the type of buyer you’ve identified who would be interested in buying your product or service. 

While defining your buyer persona does include a degree of demographic differentiation—this isn't everything you should focus on. Sure, you’ll want to narrow a scope that may include name, age, and location. But it’s even more enriching to pay attention to firmographic, technographic and chronographic details, especially in a B2B context, to build out a great buyer intent profile.  

So, thinking about your marketing campaigns—do you have defined buyer personas?

Usage and Benefits of Identifying Buyer Persona

When it comes to your marketing efforts, there’s a vast array of benefits that come from profiling a buyer persona. Not only can you engage in more streamlined marketing activities, but you’ll be gaining a deeper insight into who your buyer is and what motivates their purchase behavior. Let’s explore a few ways to leverage your buyer persona to create more robust marketing campaigns.

Intentional Ad Targeting

If you’re going to spend a portion of your marketing budget on paid ads, then you should be doing it correctly—right? When you have a defined buyer persona, you can use this ad as a guardrail for your ad targeting.

Consider programmatic ads. With your demographics, firmographics, and behavioral information defined, you’ll be able to narrow in hyper-targeted ad campaigns that will have a significant impact on website visits, conversions, and repeated purchasing. More importantly, you can truly uncover the inner dynamics of decision making by identifying and targeting the full buying group within an organisation to fast-track awareness of your solutions. It’s the best way to get every important stakeholder involved and engaged.  

Prioritize Marketing Channels

Most marketers know that there are a lot of different marketing channels out there, and sometimes choosing the most effective one to reach your target audience can feel like pulling a needle out of a haystack.

However, with your buyer persona defined, and with in-depth knowledge on which channels can best reach them, you’ll be able to optimize campaigns that you know will be in front of your ideal customer. Content syndication is a proven tactic to kick-start engagement and learn more about which channels your ideal customer persona is receptive to.  

Create, Implement and Re-Strategize the Plan as per Buyer Persona

Consumer behavior and personas will change overtime, and it’s important to know how to pivot when necessary. When you know your buyer persona well, you’re able to anticipate any changes in their purchase behavior, and can therefore adjust your marketing activities as necessary. 

Even more, you can use your buyer persona, and understanding of trends to beat out your competition. Paying attention to trends and tailoring content and ads that caters to your target audience will give you an ahead-of-time advantage over your biggest competitors. Dare to listen to your audience to understand their needs and paint points.

Creating Your Buyer Persona

Establishing a buyer persona for your target audience is something that takes some time and effort. However, when you know your customer well, much of the necessary information should come naturally.

Conduct Thorough Audience Research

This will be the boots on the ground effort that allows you to gain insightful knowledge about who your buyer is.  Arm yourself with information you capture on your website, through your sales interactions and what you have in your database. Find the common denominator among your most valuable accounts. A quick start to setting yourself up for success is by benchmarking your information with first-party data to build a solid Target Account List (TAL) or to tap into lookalike audiences to uncover an entirely new audience segment.

Identify Customer Goals and Pain Points

Once you’ve conducted your audience research, you can dig a little deeper into the persona to unlock the answers as to why they would be seeking your product or service in the first place. It’s important to understand their goals and pain points that they might be facing. By doing so, you’ll gain a unique understanding into the best ways to solace their problems.

Lead generation campaigns do not only qualify leads, it also proves to be an excellent tactic to uncover more information and insight as prospects move through the funnel.  

Resolve Pain Points

After identifying their paint points, you can then tailor solutions that are designed to solve their problems. If your solutions are powerful enough, and you’re using the correct channels to reach them, then you should see success. By knowing the ins and outs of what your buyer persona needs, you’ll find marketing solutions that work harder for your organization.

Need Help Getting Started?

If you’ve been struggling to identify your buyer persona, then you’ll want to get in touch with the experts at S2W Media. We specialize in understanding, analyzing, and tailoring solutions around your customers—giving us the ability to create buyer personas that help to lead your marketing efforts in the right direction.

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