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Reinvigorate your Marketing Persona in 5 Easy Steps
  • Contest Factory
  • October 27, 2020

Buyer persona development and refinement

Like any relationship, communicating effectively with your customer is crucial for a real connection and sustained loyalty.  You may have figured this out when you started marketing your first product / service and how many years of marketing / product evolutions has your brand been through since its origination?  We’ve seen baby companies turn into pet companies overnight with a pivot; this may be the most drastic need for a pivot, but you may also find that certain product line extensions speak to very vertical markets that you have not defined.

If you don’t know who your perfect match is, how can you possibly know what they need to hear? And in a world that feels like virtual speed-dating, where do you even begin to look?

Not to worry, we have the perfect persona for the job…

Your Marketing Persona: The Ultimate Matchmaker

A marketing persona (also known as a buyer persona) is a fictional character that represents your ideal customer: their personality traits, goals, hobbies, values, demographic information, and anything else that impacts their buyer’s journey.  And as a brand, you may have many personas for your different products and services.

By using real data and market research about your existing customers, you can better understand the world from their perspective and what type of products and marketing content they will find useful and engaging.

So whether you’re starting from scratch or just need to give your marketing persona a fresh look, these 5 simple steps will help you attract your dream customers with marketing content that will have them swooning.

Tip 1: Analyze Your Customer Data

If you aren’t using analytical tools to track customer demographics and behavior, both on your website and social media channels, you will have no way of knowing how to reach them…literally.

For example, if the bulk of your customers fall in the 25-30 age range, you will have a better chance of reaching them via Instagram or podcasts. But if your audience is predominantly in their mid to late 50’s, you would probably want to focus more on Facebook, TV or print ads.

Leveraging SEO (search engine optimization) is another powerful tool for discovering your customers’ behavior patterns and what motivates them. By tracking which keywords the consumers in your industry are searching, you can identify how your audience searches and better understand what type of language attracts them most.

The numbers don’t lie. Companies that used strategies like SEO, customer data analysis, and customer survey, experienced an increase in:

  • Website-generated leads by 97%.
  • Website-generated sales by 124%.
  • Organic search traffic by 55%.
  • Online marketing-focused efforts by 73%.

Step 2: Direct Interviews & Surveys

Surveying your audience is one of the most effective and efficient ways to discover the exact needs and values of your target audience. And with social media at your fingertips, you now have engaging ways to post polls or solicit feedback from your audience.

But truth be told, 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when they have personalized experiences with a brand, so personal interviews are ideal. However, if live exchanges aren’t possible, you can use online survey platforms like SurveyMonkey or Google Forms to help you get input from your people.

Step 3: Ask the Right Questions

One of the most challenging parts of creating an accurate buyer persona is figuring out what questions to ask. Ultimately, you want to hone in on prompts that will reveal their desires, needs, and what problems they’re trying to solve, such as the following:

  • What traits do they have in common?
  • What do they desire or need help with?
  • How do those things relate to your product or services?
  • How can you create content that meets those desires or solves those problems?

These questions will help you develop higher-level content ideas, whereas details such as interests, hobbies, and age can help shape your tone and design aesthetic.

Step 4: Bring your Persona to Life

Now it’s time to put it all together and create specific profiles to represent each of your customer personas.

First, identify how many personas you’re going to create. You will most likely need more than one, since how you market to women, for example, will be different than how you engage men, as Lexus demonstrates…

 

Next, write all attributes down and keep refining until you have a succinct list of the most important and relevant attributes for each question or category. Make sure to make your persona as real as possible, as if you were describing your sister to someone you wanted to set her up with.

Once finalized, list your personas out in a Google Doc or Excel and have a designer take a stab at delivering true representations of these personas as to give your team a real person to think about and market to.  This person should have call out attributes from the spreadsheet that you created with all the associated attributes.

Step 5: Revisit & Revise Your Persona

Just like in our own lives, your brand’s needs, and those of your customers, change over time. It’s best to update your marketing persona at least once a year to identify new behaviors and trends and make sure your content and approach are still meeting your customers’ needs.

In a recent survey, approximately 71% of the companies who exceeded their revenue goals had documented personas, and nearly 65% of them had updated their buyer personas in the last 6 months.

Relationships are hard, but winning over your customers doesn’t have to be. Creating robust, up-to-date marketing personas will ensure you are attracting the right people, and more importantly, help you connect with them in rich, meaningful ways that will have them committed for life.

 

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