Different Personas to Optimize Your Digital Marketing

So you’re doing content marketing, optimizing your SEO tactics, and aligning your brand across all online properties and nothing is happening. Your needle is not moving in the right direction and customers are not flocking through your doors in droves. What happened? What went wrong? How can you fix this?

Chances are good that if your content marketing strategy is not yielding as much ROI as you’d hoped, the problem is lack of definition for your targets. Sure, you have a vague idea of who needs your product, goods, or services but identifying the right people in the right place at the right time has proven illusive. What can be done?

Who are we REALLY selling to?

Most business owners, when asked to describe their ideal customer, have a half-formed, prepared answer. They can describe aspects of this elusive ideal customer but really digging into what makes the ideal customer tick, what spurs them to action, and/or how to best approach them can seem like a very daunting challenge. 

When your definition of the ideal customer is too vague or ill-defined, it means that you may not have considered all of the different, unique qualities of people who are attracted to your product, goods, or services. At this point, you need more than just one ephemeral idea, but an organized, targeted, data-driven approach to defining more than one type of persona. You need to develop several different personas to optimize your digital marketing. 

How do I Identify these Different Personas? 

Well, how do I work this? How do I identify the various unique personas who need my product, goods, or services to solve their existing pain points? To find out how many different personas are on their customer journey to purchasing and using your business offering, you may find yourself doing some preliminary research. Taking the time to map out your sales funnel according to areas of interest is an excellent starting point for identifying buyer personas who are ready to take action. 

flywheel-inbound-method-lifecycles

For each level of your sales cycle, ask yourself the following questions:

  • What do they need to know?
  • Why does this different persona want to know this?
  • What problem are we solving for potential customers?
  • What information are they looking for?
  • How do we show them why we are the best solution for their pain points?

By taking the time to strategically think through who is interested in your product and what questions you can answer for them to remove friction, you will be in a stronger position to both guide and influence their decision-making process. 

How do I create Context for my Different Personas?

Once you’ve identified the information your potential buyer needs to move from consideration to purchase, you will want to flesh out your customer profiles to contain the following information:

Geographic location
Household income
Pets or no pets
Age Range
Home Ownership
Relationship Status - i.e. married, single, children, no children

The information listed above is just for the individual purchaser. In order to consider the context for a B2B purchase decision, you will also need to flesh out information such as: 

Which market is this business in?
How long have they been in business?
Average annual sales figures?
Length of time in operation?

Buyer personas are a way of helping you understand both your customers and your prospects better. With this knowledge, you are more easily able to tailor your messaging, content, services, and product development to different groups of your ideal customers. Doing this research thoroughly allows you to gain a full understanding of what engages and makes your best customers tick. 

Start with the WHY?

At the most basic level, developing and working with your buyer personas allows you to understand why customers need your product, good, or service as the solution to their business problem. Which is precisely WHY you are in business in the first place.
In addition, knowing why and how your prospects and customers operate is a key business insight. Why not have our experts help in defining the right different personas to optimize your digital marketing?

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