How Marketing Personas Help Your Business
Your marketing persona isn’t a real person, but it represents the actual people who visit your site, consume your content and consider buying from your company.
To effectively market to those people, you need to know who they are.
That is, you need to know what they do, what they care about, how they find you and why they invest in your products or services.
When you know who you’re marketing to, you can confidently craft the right message for the right medium at the right time. Developing buyer personas brings together specific information about the people you need to reach.
Your customer persona can become the most important marketing tool that your audience will never see.
Armed with the information found in a persona – or even better, multiple personas for various types of people and stages of the sales funnel – you can create content that you know will lead to interest, conversions and revenue.
Flip through our example personas:
Tracking the Customer Journey, Discovery to Purchase
At Brafton, we follow a 6-step persona development process that allows us to deliver and analyze the precise buyer data you need, ultimately creating fully fledged personas.
These customer personas are blueprints for honing your messaging, communicating effectively and nurturing prospect intent. With a deeper understanding of your prospects, you can target your marketing efforts with greater success.
Throughout this journey, you uncover insights into your audience including:
- Which prospects have the highest commercial value.
- How best to reach your buyers and on which platforms.
- Who is an influencer and who is a decision-maker.
- Which stage in the buyer funnel to engage prospects.
- Campaign tactics prospects will be most receptive to.
- The strategies that convert site visitors into buyers.
Our Buyer Persona Development Process
Creating a quality persona that will effectively guide your marketing efforts in the right direction is a process that requires a lot of research and attention to the small but important details.
We don’t cut corners when we create your buyer personas. Our process goes like this:
1. Discovery
We begin with a discovery call that brings to light all the pain points you currently face, the goals you intend to achieve and how your customer personas will be used in your marketing strategy.
Your dedicated consultant unearths new opportunities for you to achieve higher ROI on each conversion and maps specific content types back to defined personas.
2. Review
You’ll share any relevant marketing collateral you currently have or use in your marketing program. We’ll also help you identify the best people from your organization, as well as some of your current customers, to speak with to fully develop your personas. This gives us a stronger sense of what makes a buyer come to your brand – what it is that makes them tick.
By collecting and developing targeted questions from your team and your customers, we customize a strategy to dive deep into current prospect metrics, lead tracking systems and demographic information.
3. Interviews
While SME from your internal teams will shine a light on your brand, products and values, user or customer interviews can reveal insights into the customer perspective.
Our team will meet with the stakeholders involved on your side via phone, video conference or in-person at their convenience. Your consultant and support team will gather critical information from your top marketing executives, which will shape the scope of our persona development to ensure all benchmarks are agreed upon.
4. Research
We review all collateral, interviews and findings and compare them with our own research for a comprehensive understanding of all the qualitative and quantitative data. From there, we begin the formal stages of conceptualization and journey mapping.
Your consultant will partner with Brafton creatives to craft five fully-rounded personas, each with distinct motivations and characteristics including job title, professional goals interests and more.
5. Development
Each persona has an intended goal. In total, the goal is always to make you money.
Some of your site visitors may only be seeking information. Others may be looking to purchase from you at that exact moment. To distinguish between the two, we create buyer personas that clearly outline who your true buyers are – getting as close to the real people, behaviors and scenarios as we possibly can.
Every content marketing asset should subsequently aim to serve a specific user intent – that’s how you drive ROI.
6. Presentation
Our design department collates and curates the visual representation of your core buyer personas. We develop a polished, finalized deliverable complete with the full branding components of your company.
With logos, custom images, character illustrations and formatted demographic information neatly designed for easy consumption, you can start targeting your personas from day one.
If your target audience changes, you can use your persona template to develop new customer personas.
Sharing these documents with other members of your sales and marketing teams enables your organization to stay on message at all times.
Stages of the Buyer Funnel
Draw a straight line from persona to conversion. That’s how we define success, and it’s how we guide content strategy and marketing programs.
Each potential customer plays a specific role in your lead generation efforts. Creating the right content and serving it to them at the right moment can shorten sales processes and increase micro and macro conversions.
Targeting intent-rich prospects starts with understanding each stage of the buyer funnel.
Awareness
Your customers are out there waiting to see great content. At this stage, however, they are being introduced to your brand. They may have landed on your site organically or heard great things about your brand.
Interest
Prospects may browse your site more closely, seeking out data, opinions, education, insights and answers to some of their pain points. They may start to develop opinions about your brand.
Consideration
You may now be in competition with other companies that provide similar services. Site visitors are gathering as much information as they can to share with their executives. They’re seeking product demos, price comparisons and any metrics that can help paint you in the best light.
Decision
At this stage, your prospects have their wallets open and are moments away from becoming buyers. They need absolute confidence in your services, buy-in from their internal stakeholders and a flexible contractual framework that suits their long-term needs.
Looking at these different types of buyers and the stages they’re in sets the tone for your content marketing campaigns. Your custom-developed buyer personas are specifically designed to extract maximum value out of each stage of the funnel.
Consulting that Converts
By creating buyer personas, you can target your audience with personalized content, which doubles email open rates and increases sales leads.
On average, buyer persona-driven marketing campaigns are more cost-effective and resource-efficient; they reduce lead conversion time and allow you to focus only on interested leads – the ones who count.
Better Results
Market your brand with intent. Make decisions backed by data.