How to Improve your Marketing Messages Using Buyer Personas

Who visits your website (or doesn’t)? What content should you highlight to get the right people there? Do you really know and understand who your buyers are in order to target them effectively?

These questions and many more can be answered when you establish buyer personas for your business. It’s vital to segment your audience and truly understand their needs, challenges, concerns and goals in order to create more powerful marketing initiatives that drive results.

In order to get started, you need to define and understand your company’s value proposition. What do you offer your customers that others can’t? What challenges do you solve for them? While this isn’t always easy, you may end up learning something about your business that you didn’t realize! And don’t worry - we’ll provide you with some tips and ideas on how to get the process started. But first, let’s take a step back and explain what buyer personas are and why they are so important.

What are buyer personas?

Buyer personas are defined as fictional and generalized representations of your ideal potential customers. The strongest buyer personas are based on data and market research, which has been conducted through insights from your customer base.

How can these fictional customers help us?

Buyer personas can be used in all departments: marketing, sales, product and services. When all departments understand who your ideal customers are, they are able to target them more effectively through your marketing efforts and sales cycles.

Why are they so important?

Once you establish your buyer personas they will be the main drivers for your content creation, in helping you develop or improve your products, and improving services from customer acquisition to customer retention and anything in between. For example, when a business segment by buyer persona, they can adjust their messaging strategy based on the specific needs of each of their targeted personas.

How do I create buyer personas?

Now that you know what buyer personas are and why they’re so important we’ll discuss how to create your own personas.

HubSpot offers some practical methods for gathering the necessary information you need in order to develop personas:

• Look through your contacts database to uncover trends about how certain leads or customers find and consume your content.
• When creating forms to use on your website, use form fields that capture important persona information. For example, if all of your personas vary based on company size, ask each lead for information about company size on your forms.
• Take into consideration your sales team's feedback on the leads they're interacting with most. What generalizations can they make about the different types of customers you serve best?
• Interview customers and prospects, either in person or over the phone, to discover what they like about your product or service. This is one of the most important steps, so let's discuss it in greater detail.

Where can I start?

We can help you create buyer personas even further when you download the buyer persona ebook. This guide will provide you with tools to easily organize research and includes tips and tricks for:

• Asking the right questions during your persona interviews and surveys
• Formatting your persona research in a compelling way
• Presenting your new, finalized buyer personas to your company
• Using your buyer personas for segmentation, content mapping, and lead nurturing

Download your free guide today!