Buyer Personas: The latest fad or an essential marketing tool?.

Fashion trends come and go, every few months the ‘latest diet’ pops up promising to banish ‘10 lbs in 10 days”! Now and then, marketing falls victim to crazy fads, think Rubik’s Cubes, Pokémon Cards, and Tamagotchi’s. We’ve seen businesses investing in fads like the overuse of keywords and empty link building, fumble. Advances in technology has enabled a marketing revolution, gone are the days of total reliance on print ads, direct mail, or TV and radio advertising. Social media, content marketing, and PPC, are just a few examples of tools that have become available within the last ten or so years. Today, we are asking: are buyer personas just another fad, or marketing must?

What Is a Buyer Persona?

Buyer personas sometimes called marketing personas, are semi-fictional portrayals of your target customer and largest markets. They include demographic data like age, location, income, and psychographic information like interests, hobbies, and reasons for buying a product or service.

Why Does it Matter?

As the online world becomes increasingly crowded, it is essential to have targeted ads and relevant communications. Like any aspect of marketing you should not create content without a plan. To ensure that your content marketing efforts will attract prospects and convert leads, an understanding of your audiences’ concerns is critical. Creating buyer personas will help a business tailor content to their ideal customer.

How to Write Effective Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are developed through research, like surveys and interviews of your target market. Researching a mix of customers, prospects, and people outside your contact database who are relevant to the organisation is advisable.  Gather demographic and psycho-graphic customer details – Google Analytics is very useful here as it presents accurate information on where website visitors live, their age, and gender. Offline research and surveys are useful when searching for information on customer job details like key tasks and salary.

To write effective buyer personas the researcher needs information like:

  • Customer Pains: your persona’s challenges
  • Goals: your personas personal and professional objectives
  • Preferred content source: is your customer on social media or do they prefer to read the newspaper, and why?
  • The customer’s reason(s) for investing in a product or service

Conclusion

Buyer personas are important. To convert leads and retain customers, an in-depth data-based representation of your ideal customer is fundamental. With detailed buyer personas, your PPC campaigns, website, and content will stand out. From more engagement on social media to increased call-to-action responses, defining your business’s buyer personas can help both online and offline businesses, B2B, B2C and everything in between to succeed.

Did you find this article helpful? What are your opinions on buyer personas? Drop us a message in the text box below to let us know if you have created buyer personas relevant to your business?

If you’d like to learn more about our Digital Marketing Services, call IMS on 091 739450

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