Buyer personas have been a vital part of marketing strategies for many years, but that hasn’t entirely translated to small businesses. In fact, many small companies don’t exactly know who the majority of their customers are, and that’s a real problem.
Once you step into digital marketing, you need to know exactly who is going to buy from you. If not, you’re going to waste money targeting the wrong people in disadvantageous locations. Instead, creating buyer personas allows you to improve your ROI and get results in a short timeframe.
Creating Buyer Personas
It should be mandatory for every small and medium-sized business owner to spend a full day figuring out exactly who their personas are. Including buying personas and brand hero personas. When we say ‘brand heroes’ we are referring to people who will help you to market your brand because they love it so much.
These brand personas might include magazine writers or just excited customers who love to share their purchases and experience on their social media accounts. Both of these parties can help you to spread brand awareness for very little money but figuring out who they could be and where they are located is vital to taking advantage.
Why Would You Do This?
Creating buyer personas allows you to have something to refer back to when you’re trying to make important decisions. It’s easy for companies to forget who they are trying to appeal to and buyer personas can help to fix that.
Every major decision should be run past your buyer persona, how is that person going to react? Is this marketing strategy targeting this person? Is my message going to reach them?
What to Consider
When you’re creating your persona, you want to ensure that you go into as much detail as possible. Creating a vague description is essentially useless, the value is found when you create an incredibly detailed persona that includes a name, a location and a list of websites they would visit.
By doing this, you can create a useful persona that will assist in your marketing strategies, allowing you to see better results from your campaigns.
Applying Personas to SEO
SEO can be efficiently split into on-page and off-page. The majority of on-page SEO can be categorized into creating excellent content and optimizing it for specific keywords.
By creating compelling buyer personas, you can ensure that you create high quality content that is aimed at this group of people. Without these buyer personas, it’s easy to think that a piece of content would be great when in fact it wouldn’t be.
As with everything, buyer personas help to keep you on-track and prevent you from making mistakes. With SEO, you must ensure that you’re creating content that people are searching for and that they want to read. Without buyer personas, it’s difficult to find these keywords and create content ideas.
However, once you have an imaginary person in mind, you can theorize the types of posts that specific person would be interested in. This framework gives you an insight into what is worth writing about and what isn’t. In the long run, this can save you thousands of dollars in wasted content and SEO costs.
Applying Personas to PPC
PPC or Pay Per Click is a paid marketing tactic whereby you pay for each visitor that clicks on the ads which you are showing on different websites. But if you don’t know who your ideal customer is or what they like, how can you create ads specifically for them?
Buyer personas are essential for PPC whereby you’re spending significant amounts of money each month to drive this traffic. If you don’t target the right audience, it’s possible that your conversion rate will be much lower than expected and this could even make your ads unprofitable.
Figuring out a profile of your ideal customer is vital to deciding where to advertise and what ad to use. By understanding this imaginary person, you can get a much better idea about what would convince them to click an ad and how you can entice them to become a paying customer.
Applying Personas to Content Marketing
Content marketing is a tactic whereby you use outreach and other methods to market your piece of content to the people that will be most interested in them. This method brings targeted traffic to your website that will hopefully convert into paying customers either now or in the future.
But it’s tough to do content marketing without a buyer persona. Perhaps you have created a piece of content that is related to your industry; it could be a guide, a quiz or perhaps even an instructional post. Either way, without a buyer profile it’s impossible to know who to target.
With content marketing, there is an extra dimension, you are often working with journalists and other website owners to create publicity. In this case, you need to create our second persona, the brand hero who will give you advertising for a low cost.
For example; if you owned a mobile phone company you might be looking for young, male journalists that love phones, are entrepreneurs and dislike iPhones. This type of person is likely to be interested in publicizing your business, and by creating this brand hero persona, you can narrow your search and become more efficient.
Content marketing can be extremely time-consuming, especially if you’re using a shotgun approach instead of creating these profiles and narrowing down.
Impact Your Website Design
Finally, your website should obviously be designed to appeal to your ideal customer. If you owned an MMA website, it’s unlikely that it would be pink and covered in flowers because your main audience is young men interested in fighting. That specific example is obvious, but this isn’t always the case.
In fact, for many businesses, their most important customers are often not the ones that they target. A typical example of this is fitness gyms that would love to attract more young bodybuilders and muscular people, but in reality, earn the most money from people looking to lose weight.
In this case, it’s vital that the business identifies their true brand heroes and customer personas so that they can target more efficiently and increase revenues.