Developing buyer personas enhances your content creation and mail marketing efforts. Whether you’re an established business or a startup, taking the time to perform market research and create a profile on your ideal customers makes reaching your target audience and introducing them to your product or service an optimized and scalable experience.
Do you want to learn how to identify your buyer persona and use it to enrich your marketing strategy? Keep reading and learn how Presort Inc. can help you.
What Is a Buyer Persona and Why Is It Important?
Buyer personas are fictional illustrations of your ideal customers based on market research and relevant data. With buyer personas, you can focus on contacting your target audience. When you have a deep understanding of who you want to connect with, it’s easier to develop a content marketing plan that speaks to your buyer persona goals and addresses their pain points.
Creating your buyer persona is a game of storytelling. You need to develop a marketing strategy and create content that resonates with your ideal customer. Getting all the details right is essential to persuading your audience that your product or services are the right fit for them. To develop a helpful buyer persona, you must uncover as much about your potential customer as possible and tailor your every effort to their interests.
The Advantages of Creating Buyer Personas
Defining buyer personas enhances your marketing strategy. Understanding potential customers’ pain points help you:
- Focus your multichannel marketing plan
- Create a more actionable mailing list
- Tailor marketing messages to your target audience with unique offerings
- Ensure your marketing efforts align with customer interests
Not sure where to start with your buyer persona? Here’s our step-by-step guide.
How To Develop Buyer Personas
Creating the ideal customer is all about market research and customer data. Establishing a mailing list and expanding your customer base is straightforward with the right demographic information and content marketing expertise. Here’s where you should start:
Do Your Research
Building a detailed persona starts with information. Get an idea of who you want to work with now and who you’d like to connect with later. Look through your contacts database to understand how existing customers interact with your content. Conduct detailed interviews with customers and potential customers to learn what they like about your product or service.
Create survey forms that request relevant information to mail to potential customers or host them on your website. If your personas work in specific industries or have a particular company size, leave space for prospects to enter information about their industry and company size.
Contact your sales team and look at your analytics. Look at previous social media ads and direct mail campaign results and use them to inform your new direction. Read all relevant reports and pay attention to the demographic information of the customers responding to your marketing efforts. Take note of what types of collateral customers are interacting with the most. Is it flyers and postcards, or catalogs and brochures?
Use the information to sketch an ideal customer who makes sense for your brand and marketing goals.
Fill Out Demographic Information
Use all the collected information to arrange potential buyers into distinct buyer personas. Take all responses from prospects and identify common goals and challenges. Clearly define what people are looking for from your product or service and use that clarity to shape your personas.
Also, determine how many personas you want to create and pursue. Remember, you don’t need to reach everyone at once. If you’re building a new marketing strategy and want to get a feel for the process, it’s okay to create buyer personas for your most popular market segments. You can always revise and refocus your buyer personas to match your current goals.
Create a Story for Your Buyer Persona
Now it’s time to write. You need to create a crystal clear picture of your buyer personas. For this step, it’s easier for some to write a lot about their personas and select the most critical parts to share with the business. To start, give your persona a name. It may seem silly, but the point is to personalize your marketing efforts to reach a particular person. How do you tailor something to someone you don’t know?
Buyer persona names make the process personal. It’s easier to form a genuine connection. Remember, you need a full portrait. Think about how old your persona is, what job titles they hold, where they live, their hobbies, career goals, favorite food, and how they plan to use your product. Understanding what they want and how they like it makes it easier for you to interact with them once you start your content marketing campaign.
Determine Challenges and Buyer Persona Goals
The structure of your narrative is in place. Now it’s time to expand on details even further. Dive into the qualities we mentioned earlier—describe your buyer’s role in the company, their professional goals, and the pain points they need to navigate to achieve them. Consider whether your persona is a parent or if they’re in a management position. Do they want to drive change in their company by heading up new initiatives, or are they winding down and approaching retirement?
Figure out what your potential buyer struggles with. What pain points do they have, and what can you do to remedy them? Write about what keeps them from introducing that new energy efficiency program to their department. Are they afraid of the cost? The more challenges you explore, the more opportunities you have to deliver a solution.
Much like the previous step, this should be a freewriting exercise. Write down as much as needed to understand your persona. Even if some information doesn’t seem relevant to your product or service, your team will have a fuller picture to work with when building your mailing list. Detail makes the difference between a hazy sketch and a full-fledged illustration.
Create Content
Once you know your buyer personas and are familiar with their challenges and aspirations, you can finally develop content marketing collateral that speaks to their experience. Share what you’ve built with your sales and marketing teams and create content that addresses your buyer personas’ pain points. Revise existing content to match your goals and refine your mailing list to reflect the kind of people you want to reach.
Presort Inc. Helps Businesses Outline Their Buyer Persona Goals
Spearheading a new marketing strategy is challenging when you don’t have the time or resources to spare. Presort Inc. is the ultimate direct mail, printing, and logistics solution. We bring creative design, quality goods and services, and effective strategy together to striking effect.
Our state-of-the-art mailing list services ensure your direct mail materials reach strategic targets. Our specialists consider consumer locations, income levels, demographic information, and more. We have you covered whether you want a list based on social media correspondents or landing page visitors. We help you make a lasting impression with ideal customers.
Ready to discover your buyer persona? Reach out and speak with our experts today.