The Importance of Buyer Personas
Too often marketers and business owners forget that their targets are people, NOT numbers. But, you can’t expect to reach engaged customers without first identifying your Buyer Persona.
The concept of buyer personas is one of the most overlooked areas when it comes to a company’s marketing strategy. I can’t tell you how many times over the last 10 years of GoViral, I’ve asked a client who they are selling to, who their IDEAL buyer is, and they tell me something along the lines of “men and women between 18 and 65 in the UK interested in fitness.” As an inbound marketer, I NEED to know who I’m talking to in order to attract, convert and delight them. How do I talk to a “men and women between 18 and 65?” What basis do I have to understand their needs or their problems?
One of the first things I learned in sales is that if you just tell someone all the great things you do, then you are just telling them features. If you first take the time to simply LISTEN and find out what their needs are and then match your offering to those needs, then you are describing benefits. People buy benefits, not features. Yet business owners are so quick to pass over that step and narrow down on a human, authentic ideal customer to target.
Their fear is that if I make them narrow down a specific persona to target, then they won’t be able to reach other audiences. But that’s not what happens. When I identify a buyer persona, I can create content that speaks to them. So yeah, the money spent on this targeting is going to give you the best return. But do you know what else it does? It also creates content, copy, images and voice that sounds authentic. Content that speaks in a helpful and caring way. Content that brings customers.
Instead of being that person who enters a room and wants to tell everyone as loudly as possible how great they are to all the “men and women between 18 and 85,” be the person who’s done their research before they entered the party and take the time to listen and offer great advice to the people who would benefit the most. This will create a healthy buyer journey that gives you the most bang for your buck. Here’s how.
-Belinda Filippelli, Managing Director at GoViral Digital
Your buyer persona is a huge part of successful Inbound Marketing. Instead of wasting time and resources to market to the masses (outbound marketing), tailoring your content to attract potential buyers (inbound marketing) “looking” for your product or service can save you a lot of time, effort (and $$). Inbound marketing can be viewed as a cycle: attract, engage, delight. You attract potential customers and engage with them with interesting content, and then delight them by addressing their problems (usually through your product/service). But in order to engage with your audience in a way that will convert, you have to be sure you’re talking to the right people. This is your buyer persona.
What Is A Buyer Persona?
Buyer Personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers based on real data about demographics and online behavior.
When creating your buyer persona(s), it’s important to go beyond the traditional demographics. You should include aspects such as behavior patterns, motivations, goals, and any other factors that would further clarify who your target is. The more detailed you are, the better.
A detailed buyer persona will help you determine where to focus your time. As a result, it will facilitate your ability to attract the most valuable visitors, leads, and customers to your business, and keep them brand loyal by ensuring you use the right voice.
It’s the difference between making a few one-time sales, and making a community of brand-loyal customers who will continue to convert.
Questions to Ask When Creating A Buyer Persona
To get started, think about the different facets of your buyer persona’s life: personal, professional, values and fears, goals and challenges, and use this to better understand how to speak and sell to your audience. Below are some good starter questions we use at GoViral.
After you’ve established the foundations of your buyer persona, you can even take it further to really get down to understanding what drives them by considering any objections they might have, and how you could convince them otherwise.
Tying it Together
Once you’ve gotten this far, you’re ready to start putting the pieces together to make the story of your buyer persona! Here’s a brief example of one buyer persona (often, you will have multiple!) we came up with for an e-commerce client, The Clean Living Company, a health food and supplement company specialising in organic bone broth and collagen supplements.
Be Flexible
Once you’ve got your buyer persona down, don’t be afraid to change it. After you get things moving, you might realise an aspect of your buyer persona that you were way off on. Maybe you’ve seen some reservations you didn’t account for in your initial strategy? Maybe you have a totally different audience interested in your product or service that you didn’t initially account for? That’s great! Marketing is an ever-changing process, so it’s important to be flexible and willing to make updates and improvements as time goes on.
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Inbound vs Outbound Marketing
At GoViral, we’ve been practising and preaching inbound marketing for 10 whole years. You may or may not be familiar with this term, so we made sure to explain it to you. Inbound marketing is different from the traditional outbound marketing method. Do you know the difference? You can read more about it below and how it can improve your business.
What is outbound marketing?
Try to visualise that your phone rings and it’s a company trying to sell you a doghouse but you don’t even own a dog. You try to hang up but the person is still talking! Well, this is an example of outbound marketing. Outbound marketing examples include irrelevant billboards trying to sell you something, multiple emails advertising products that you don’t need and late-night telemarketing shows. This form of marketing tries to blast its message (product, service, etc) from within the company out to the world, hoping to attract potential customers. The company using outbound marketing showers everyone with these advertisements, but only a few customers will be relevant and make a purchase.
So why is this method outdated? Well, you are wasting time sending messages to people that aren’t interested. It is surprising that businesses still operate this way. They shoot their ads into the dark hoping to hit a target. Inbound marketing is different and more effective.
What is inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing attracts potential customers to you through engaging social media content. Customers become aware of your brand through your website, then show interest in your product and hopefully end up making a purchase. For any company, this might seem quite obvious to do, right? Try to imagine a magnet attracting customers from the outside to your brand. Content from a company using inbound marketing is made to get to people who might actually be interested based on the target buyer persona. Well, it hasn’t always been done this way. Outbound marketing was the go-to in the past, and many companies and brands are still doing it the old-fashioned way.
What are the main differences between inbound and outbound marketing?
Instead of wasting time and resources to market to the masses (outbound marketing), tailoring your content to attract potential buyers (inbound marketing) “looking” for your product or service can save you a lot of time, effort (and $$). Inbound marketing can be viewed as a cycle: attract, engage, delight. You attract potential customers and engage with them with interesting content, and then delight them by addressing their problems (usually through your product/service).
How can you use inbound marketing for your business?
Are you still using outbound marketing? Times are changing and seeing that inbound marketing is more effective, it could greatly benefit your marketing performance. We made some suggestions that can get you started in transforming your business by using inbound marketing techniques.
Attract
You can start by looking at the content you use across your social channels and website. Does this content add value to customers you want to attract? Posting about a sale might be valuable, but posting a guide on how to successfully use your product or service can be even better. Also, be sure to optimise your SEO by adding keywords to your content. Having relevant, interesting content with added value will help you to appear higher up in the search engines, therefore helping to drive organic traffic to your website.
Engage
When you finally get new leads from your valuable content, make sure to keep in mind that your goal is to build a long-term relationship. Try to sell solutions rather than just a product. Make sure those that are in contact with leads are building relationships and acting courteously. Think long-term rather than short. Which relationships do you want to have?
Delight
Let’s say that a lead changed to an actual customer. He or she followed your company’s social channels, got engaged and bought into it. What’s next? Keep the engagement going by acting as advisors to help your customers anytime. You can create surveys or chat boxes to keep the conversation going at any stage in the buying cycle. Also, listen to your social channels and react to your customers when they comment (or even complain about something). Reacting can help save a disappointed customer and it makes people feel like they matter (which they do if they’re you’re customers),
These are just a few tips to get you started in using inbound methods rather than outbound marketing. Do you want professional guidance? GoViral has now a whole decade of experience specialising in inbound marketing and we can help you improve your business. Contact us to learn more!