Defining a clear target market is key to developing any successful marketing campaign — but it’s not always so simple to nail down your ideal customer. The good news is that recent advances in data collection and segmentation have made it much simpler to create robust buyer personas that will help you better understand your audience.
Let’s take a closer look at how your organization can use buyer personas to ensure your marketing efforts resonate with your customers’ needs.
Buyer personas are defined as “semi-fictional representation[s] of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.” When your team creates these representations, the end result will be about 3 to 5 buyer personas that will translate to the target market segments that make up about 90 percent of your overall sales. Depending on your industry, this number could be even larger.
Assessing your current buyers will be step one when beginning to create your buyer personas. These are the people you can most easily gather qualitative research from, which 90 percent of top-performing companies use to better understand their existing customer database. A marketing partner can help you conduct this and broader market research to gather robust insights about your audience. Once you’ve gathered this information, it’s time to put it to use in your buyer personas.
Ask yourself, what common threads have you found in your research? Does it turn out that your customers and other members of your target market tend to get their information from the same trusted sources? Do they all tend to have similar budgets to spend on your services? How do these factors differ by job title or industry? All of these insights should contribute to your buyer personas, by determining the ways you can group your audience and the messaging that will resonate with each group. Ask yourself: should you create separate messages for each persona? Or will more than one persona respond well to the same message?
We’ve written before on the importance of A/B testing, which can also be used to help you make pointed choices on whether your buyer personas are likely to behave in similar ways. A/B testing messaging on your website will allow you to track the buyer’s journey in real time, which will give you quantitative data necessary to refine your message. In fact, mastery of just the online messaging different audience members are likely to respond to can result in a staggering 900 percent increase in visitors’ length of time on site — and this accounts for only a portion of buyer personas’ overall effectiveness.
With stats like these, it’s no coincidence that top companies are investing in the creation of detailed buyer personas. If you’re interested in learning more, contact us here.
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