A larger audience = more sales. It seems logical; the more people who know about your product, the more you’ll sell, right?
WRONG!
Targeting everyone in your marketing efforts is a waste of money. You have to be strategic. Your business’ products or services have an intended audience.
Why waste money marketing to those individuals who you already know will never use your services? Instead, focus your marketing dollars on those who matter by creating an accurate buyer persona to guide your marketing decisions.
Why You Need a Buyer Persona
Assumptions about your audience are easy, but conjecture rarely leads to smart marketing.
A buyer persona, or fictionalized representation of your ideal customer based on real-world data, will help your business identify the audience most suitable to target in your marketing efforts.
By better understanding your audience and their needs, your business will increase sales, save on advertising, improve content creation, and communicate clearly.
Spend Smart
Reaching one million of the wrong individuals will be less profitable for your business than just two of the right individuals. But first, you have to locate these individuals.
Problem: You aren’t sure how to best allocate your advertising budget each fiscal year.
Solution: Review the demographics, interests, and consumer behavior of your buyer persona to make educated decisions about the best advertising mediums for your business. Place your advertisements where your target audience is and not where you think they are.
Pro Tip: Don’t make assumptions about where to place advertisements. Use demographic research based on your buyer persona to identify which platforms, both traditional and digital, are best suited for your audience. You may be surprised by your findings.
Improve Your Content
With over 30 million Facebook business pages, the crowded digital landscape requires brands wanting to capture individuals’ attention (and dollars) to be more creative than ever.
Problem: Social media requires a steady stream of compelling content to keep audiences coming back.
Solution: By pinpointing your intended audience, a buyer persona can identify their interests, habits, activities, and behaviors. This information will aid you in finding and creating better material tailored to capture their attention.
Pro Tip: Keep the focus on your customer. How can you be helpful to them? How can you solve the problems identified in your research? These should be the main focus of your content.
Communicate
How you convey information to your audience is just as important as the actual information.
Problem: Your business needs a consistent message that both resonates with your audience and works across a variety of platforms.
Solution: A buyer persona allows you to understand your audience’s communication preferences. These preferences can inform everything from your advertising word choice to the way you begin your email newsletters.
Pro Tip: Use your buyer persona information to create a communication style guide. This guide will make it easier to stay consistent across different advertising channels. Include information like company pronoun preference, response guidelines, tone, and the like.
Increase Sales
Before you can sell to someone, you need to understand their needs.
Problem: Despite your best marketing efforts, sales are slow.
Solution: A buyer persona provides the audience’s preferences and behaviors. This information will allow you to reach them where they want to hear from you and format your message in a way that is most appealing and thus likely to lead to a sale.
Pro Tip: Use your buyer persona as the basis for advertising audiences on your Facebook Business Page. Use these audiences when creating promoted posts and Facebook ads. Analyze their performance in real-time with Facebook’s insights and make changes based on your results.