Buyer Personas: How to Improve Your Campaigns

Part II of our buyer persona series

Buyer Personas provide the clarity and focus you need to create content that attracts more traffic to your website and converts more customers. Before you can begin to develop your first offer, a single blog post or call to action, you have to know the person you are trying attract.

This is part two of our Buyer Persona series. The first article in the series provides step-by-step instructions and a FREE template to get you on the road to creating perfect content.

Picking up where we left off in the first article… it’s time to name your buyer persona.

Your Buyer Persona’s Name

At the very core of developing effective buyer personas is the art of asking the right questions to the right people. Naming your buyer persona and attaching the persona to a human face will help your team visualize and communicate around a specific persona. The result is an improved capacity to visualize and empathize. It improves continued development and understanding of the buyer persona as a real person. Those who achieve the greatest successes in inbound marketing, do a fabulous job of mapping their offers, they write better blog posts, send more effective emails and promote the most compelling content (relentlessly) throughout the Internet.

Accordingly, your customer or buyer personas provide a communications platform about your buyer. Well-crafted buyer personas result in more leads and a more effective nurturing experience toward the decision-making process. Clarity and accuracy with your buyer personas will catalyze your marketing and sales strategies, resulting in more sales.

Intuiting Shifts in Behavior

It is so important to intuit shifts in buying behavior patterns. Buyer behaviors are shifting faster than ever. Adjust your personas and inbound campaigns in real time.

Buyer Personas Drive Marketing and Sales Strategies

Buyer personas drive your marketing and sales strategies. Developing buyer personas is more of a science than a guessing game. It’s more objective than subjective. Buyer personas are the qualitative and quantitative guiding light for every inbound strategy, content element, CTA, landing page and offer.

Marketers who rely on intuition to develop their campaigns and content, will always underperform. A campaign that misses the mark will cost you more than the best marketing team will ever cost you. Interestingly, studies reveal that organizations that leverage buyer persona insights gain a powerful edge in the market, outperforming their competition by a large margin.

How Do You Use Buyer Personas in Marketing?

Be a Problem Solver for Your Buyer

It has become clear as day that to win customers, you must excel at problem solving for your visitors and buyers. Even unconsciously, at every phase of the buyer’s journey, they are looking to you to improve the quality of their lives; to qualitatively and/or quantitatively make their lives easier and more convenient.

There is a plethora of documented evidence that a plain website with copied or unremarkable content and uninspired design has no chance of attracting your buyer, and attaining search engine rankings that will move the needle on new leads and new customer conversions.

Attracting Your Buyer to Your Website

A quality website is worthless if your buyer can’t find it. An easy first phase strategy could be to build credibility in the communities your personas frequently visit. Begin laying the foundations of trust in these communities, forums and platforms.

With so many social networks it is important to identify the channels your personas frequent and find value on. With a little research, you can make an informed decision about which channels to invest your time and resources in and in what conversations to participate.

If you let your highly researched, comprehensive buyer persona lead the way in understanding buyer preferences, needs and wants, there’ll be no more guesswork involved in developing a conversation with your buyers.

Creating Buyer Persona Centric Campaigns

There is no way to shortcut this process. You must meticulously segment your buyers and create strategic campaigns that target each individual buyer persona.

Start with your highest potential, most profitable client. Alternatively, you could start with the persona you know best. Create an entire campaign for that one persona. The lessons you’ll learn in the process of creating the first campaign will help you improve the quality and reduce the amount of time to launch the next campaign for the next buyer persona.

A campaign typically consists of the following:

The Inbound Marketing Funnel

To better understand how a well devised inbound marketing strategy works, we need to understand the inbound marketing funnel.

There are four stages in the inbound marketing funnel:

1. Attract
2. Convert
3. Close
4. Delight

Attract Phase

The attract phase is designed to attract strangers – more specifically, targeted personas – to your website or campaign landing page. In this phase, you’ll perform online marketing activities similar and not limited to these:

Create irresistible content offers and leverage the following promotional tactics:

• Blogging
• Calls-to-actions
• Search engine optimization
• Keyword targeting
• Social Media Management
• Social and Search engine ads

The intention of this phase is to convert your stranger to a visitor. Your content, social media, social media marketing, search engine marketing, blog posts, offers and call to actions should be written direct to your specific buyer persona.

Your calls-to-action in each of those promotional channels should be irresistible and compelling enough that the visitor can’t wait to download your offer. As soon as they click the submit button on your landing page, their information goes straight into your CRM (MailChimp, Constant Contact, Aweber, SalesForce or HubSpot) and Bingo! your stranger is now a lead!

The whole purpose is to attract them to your website so that you can collect their information and nurture them down the funnel, ultimately converting them into a new customer.

Convert Phase

As you attract your targeted personas to your website and landing pages, the conversion process occurs when the visitor responds to your calls-to-action and submits a form in exchange for something valuable and relevant. Using the Buyers Journey Template will help you develop high-quality content they will want at every phase of their journey. The form submission then automatically triggers a strategic and well-timed email sequence that will nurture your prospect through the buyer’s journey and the marketing funnel.

In this phase, your visitor is converted to a lead. Download our free guide and template to help you create content that converts so you can close more customers.

Close Phase

In the close stage, your lead begins receiving personalized nurturing emails that are specifically relevant and personalized to them and their specific needs at this phase. Your emails will provide very specific types of offers that are intended to persuade your buyer to choose your solution.  In addition to emails, you’ll have social media and other marketing efforts aligned to the needs of your persona in this phase.

Knowing when to pass a lead to sales

 In the process of developing your inbound marketing strategies, be sure to identify the specific visitor activities that signal the proper timing to pass this lead to your sales team. Companies who boast the highest closing rates, have identified and implement the following almost seamlessly:

• A clear understanding of when to pass the lead to the sales team. This is typically driven by specific web pages they visit, form submissions or onsite behaviors. The trigger to pass the lead to sales may look different for different personas you serve.
• A defined operational and sales process that is engaged when the lead is passed to the sales team
• Accountability to the processes and timely review of data driven KPIs to ensure the highest closing rates

Delight Phase

The intention of this phase is to provide your customers with what they need in a remarkable way. By virtue of having created a comprehensive and accurate buyer persona, you’ll know what will impress and thrill your buyer. The content you’ll provide will so intuitively and abundantly fulfill their pre- and post-purchase needs, interests, challenges and desires that they will have to tell their friends and sing your praises online!

The rewards of a well developed, high-impact inbound marketing strategy will delight your customers and every single person who engages your brand! When you know each of your buyer personas intimately, you can blow the top off of the delight phase!

The post-purchase buyer persona has very specific needs, goals, challenges and opportunities as a result of using your product or solution. Understanding how you can delight them and help them maximize their results once they’ve purchased from you is important to increasing customer retention and referrals. If you are a B2B company and you understand how your solution creates competitive advantage for your customers, you would focus on a post-purchase content marketing strategy that helps them to continue to improve their results.

Creating a Successful Inbound Marketing Campaign

Our article, Increase Your Inbound Marketing Results – 7 Easy Steps, kicks off another series of articles addressing the 7 elements of a successful inbound marketing campaign. In this series, we provide you with a step-by-step, how-to guide for launching your first campaign and (for those who have already ventured into the inbound marketing world) how to increase the results you are getting with your existing campaigns.

In the first episode, we’ll discuss what inbound marketing is, how to be successful and how the buyer persona influences them.

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The Campaign Elements

Our third and final installment in the “How-to” create and leverage detailed buyer personas series outlines all of the elements in a successful campaign.  We share our agency hacks and hard-won know-how as we cover in great detail how to create an epically successful campaign. We also get granular on the important and often under developed elements. Here is a peak into what we cover:

• How to create a high-performance landing page
• What content performs best for your persona
• Why having a CRM with Smart Technology gives you a significant advantage
• How to leverage social shares and referrals
• How to leverage your buyer persona to catalyze campaign results
• How to set campaign goals and key performance indicators (KPIs)
• What goals and KPIs you should consider when launching your campaign
• How to measure success – understanding the data and metrics you should monitor

You don’t want to miss this article. Throughout the detailed how-to series, we provide a ton of tools and step-by-step coaching for creating powerful detailed buyer personas.

If you haven’t downloaded our agency’s detailed, time-tested Buyer Personal template, do it now!

FREE – Detailed Buyer Persona Template

Download it Today – Get Started!