Transforming Your Marketing in 4 Steps – Part 1: Identifying Your Buyer Persona

Get ahead of the curve in your target market!

Successful marketing hinges on knowing crucial information about your potential customers, and in the world of inbound marketing we call that knowing your buyer personas. One of the most important parts of a successful inbound campaign is knowing your audience, and it’s critical for more than just marketing. Sales departments also need to know who they’re selling to, so identifying your buyer persona is marketing priority #1.

Before we dig in, let’s back up just a bit to look at what we mean when we say, “buyer persona.” Basically when you compile your market research and crucial data about your existing customers, you can create an almost-hypothetical depiction of what your ideal customer would look like.

Who Uses Buyer Personas?

With well-crafted personas, you can find the answers to buyer persona questions such as what your ideal customer looks for in your company, as well as how they look for it, what demographic they belong to, and much more, allowing you to adjust your marketing where needed.

Buyer personas tell you more than what your website should look like, though that is one of the most common reasons they’re created. Inbound marketing teams will use them to structure inbound campaigns, and sales teams will be able to know just how to craft sales messaging when the time comes.

How to Go about Identifying Your Buyer Persona

Figuring out your ideal buyer persona requires some preparation, research, and organization, and it can be tough to know where to start. Feeling a little lost is okay, and here at Farotech, we’ve seen time and again what can happen when a business owner feels too intimidated to research their persona.

If your business has a website up, or is in the process of making one, you have a good place to start your buyer persona research. Websites provide a range of valuable data on your customers, and give you a great launch pad to creating detailed personas.

For your Website:

If your website already exists, you can gather great information on your customers and current users with any of a wide range of analytical tools such as Google Analytics, Hotjar, and Facebook Audience Insights to name a few.

If your website is brand new, it can feel like starting right from scratch – and for many people, it is. The future is unknown, the path is wide open, and you could start your marketing strategy in any number of ways. Usually, it’s a toss-up between traditional research methods on existing markets and your own data, or research on other companies to get a competitive leg up.

For your Inbound Marketing:

You can apply the data from website analysis for you buyer personas, as well as information you get through general research. A persona will tell you valuable information, such as:

• What values your customers care about
• What services your customers look for
• What kinds of companies they generally work with
• How they look for information (be it blogs, videos, shopping, reviews, etc.)
• The demographics your customers belong to (including geographical, financial, socioeconomic, and more).

When you have a reliable strategy for formulating buyer personas, you can craft your inbound strategy to create content for your customers in an organic and natural way. With market segmentation, you can further divide your customers into groups of similar personas if you have a more diverse customer base.

For your Sales Messaging:

Sales teams will be able to customize sales presentations and media for a particular persona, which can be tremendous for your ROI. Your sales teams can even be given “negative personas,” representing the kind of customer you try to avoid as a company, giving you the competitive edge on your sales campaigns.

Let’s Recap:

Identifying your buyer persona can be a straightforward endeavor, as long as you utilize the right tools for the job. When you do the right buyer persona research, you’ll better understand your customers and be that much more ahead of the curve in your market.

For more on identifying your buyer persona, contact a Farotech marketing expert today!

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