Savvy marketers take the time to create and adopt buyer personas as a key part of their marketing strategy. These profiles capture information about consumer groups including demographic information, motivations and attitudes. To some, this may seem like a wasted effort.
How can we understand the entire consumer market from a handful of buyer personas?
Marketers who adopt a one-size-fits-all strategy and expect their brands to be everything to everybody are doomed to fail. By first identifying which demographic groups your core consumers sit in and then learning as much as you can about them by developing buyer personas lets you create and execute focused campaigns that work.
Buyer Personas Identify Key Demographics
The process of creating a customer persona involves taking the time to explore your business’s analytics to find the interests represented in your customer base. From this, you can build a few profiles representing the type of people to whom you’re selling, including their income range to their motivations, fears and buying attitudes.
The Shopify blog has an excellent step by step guide to finding this information and using it to create effective buyer personas.
When a marketer understands their buyer in great depth and detail, they can target advertising and content towards them.
When you know the motivations and fears of your consumer, you can create advertising that targets those attitudes, effectively producing personalized marketing pitches.
Powerful Content Can Be Aimed Directly at Consumers
We already know that the effectiveness of content marketing is based on producing content that is relevant and valuable to our audience.
When we understand how our core customers think, we are able to zero in on the content that they want to read and engage with.
The positive effects of a content marketing strategy are amplified when the audience is a known quantity.
Information About Buyer Attitudes Can Predict Behavior
Long and frustrating roadblock for most marketers, customer behavior is a difficult value to capture.
Buyer personas make behavioral factors more transparent and easier to key in on.
According to the Harvard Business Review, consumer attitude and behavior are inexorably linked. Customer personas provide a method of understanding buyer attitudes, which can be used to predict the buyer’s behavior.
When we know generally how our customers are going to behave in the face of our marketing campaigns, we get a clear path to the sale.
When you have access to deep understand about your core customers, it makes it much easier to market to them, and you’ll see an increase in your marketing ROI.
The benefits to marketing that customer personas present prove their worth, even given the time it takes to create them.
Do you or your clients use personas? Let me know in the comments section below.
