6 Things to Consider When Building Your Buyer Personas

Inbound marketing is not a one-off campaign. Inbound marketing requires a comprehensive strategy. This strategy should include content marketing, lead generation and prospect conversion. This comprehensive strategy will help you attract the right people to your digital channels and make them engaged customers. Inbound marketing is best done by identifying your target audience and the decision-making process they follow.

What are you trying to reach with your marketing efforts to reach? The first step to developing an inbound marketing strategy is to define your buyer personas. Based on data from your customer base and internal market research, buyer personas are your ideal customers. Creating buyer personas gives you and your organization a lot of insight. Creating buyer personas can target your sales and marketing strategies to the right prospect. You can also help identify your ideal customer and un-qualify those who do not fit your persona profile. Your sales team can focus on your ideal customer, guide product and service improvements, and align marketing, sales, customer service, and sales. It is important to attract the right people to your digital channels. Convert them into qualified leads and make them loyal customers who will help grow your business.

Six Factors to Consider when Building Buyer Personas

1. Determine the job title or role of your target persona. This will help you to understand their company and position.
2. Think about how they measure success in their job. How can you help them get there?
3. Consider the industries in which your product or services are most relevant.
4. Identify the most important challenges and pain points that this person faces in their job. How can you help them save time, money, and resources? Your product or service must always solve a problem.
5. Find out how people search for information about your product or service. Your marketing efforts will be centered if you can identify where they are searching for information. This will help you stay in front of your target audience no matter where they are in their research process.
6. Take into account the targeted buyer’s demographics. These include education, background, location, career path, goals, etc.

Practical Application:

To ensure that their content reached the right audience, a professional services company needed to identify its personas. Their content might have been too broad without a target persona. This could have resulted in unqualified prospects or unnecessary sales conversations with people who will not convert into customers. We analyzed the top ten clients they had over the past five years to determine their target buyer profile. This allowed them to identify the industries in which they had the greatest success and the most interested people in their offerings. Their target audience was:

• Mid-sized business owners: They are aware of the internal challenges they face with training, development and hiring but don’t have the time or resources to devote to these tasks because they run the day-to-day business.
• The VP of Human Resources for an enterprise or mid-sized company: This person is responsible for overall strategy and hiring processes and needs outside perspectives to help them build a comprehensive learning program. They turn to professional services firms to help with ongoing initiatives and strategic projects.

These personas were identified and targeted to help with content development. This also allows for alignment between sales and marketing to create a comprehensive marketing plan. This allows you to make sure that your content is relevant to your buyer’s journey and helpful to them. Persona development is the most important part of an inbound marketing plan. This will allow you to strategize how your marketing plan should target your ideal prospects.