How important are buyer personas?

Before you can focus on creating a successful marketing campaign, you need to understand your audience, specifically buyer personas.

Buyer personas are semi-fictional characters that speak to your ideal customer. Researching and developing these characters is a crucial first step to beginning your marketing strategy.

Jumping right into content creation or design without first researching your industry and its consumer’s purchasing patterns could result in creating irrelevant marketing, which is a waste of your time and money.

Here’s the benefit to creating buyer personas:

You can understand the needs, wants, and behavior of your buyers
It’s not enough to know that your product or service sells, you need to know why and to who. Successful marketing should meet your buyer’s needs or solve their problems. Sometimes buyers aren’t even aware they have a need or problem until they are looking at your marketing material and saying, “This is exactly what I need to make my life easier!”
Creating buyer personas help pinpoint these needs, wants, and behaviors and give you a deeper understanding of how to sell to that persona.
You can create relevant marketing strategies
Identifying and developing personas for your brand helps you create a user experience, brand strategy, content, and buyer journey that your user will trust and understand. It can also give you insight into your buyers’ purchasing decisions so you know how and when to target them.
Many consumers, especially younger generations, are leary of ads. Knowing your buyer means you can get in front of them in a way that sells them without appearing to be a sales pitch.
Creating relevant marketing strategies also means utilizing technology and creating a user experience that is relevant to the demographic of your buyer. You wouldn’t want to create an Instagram campaign if your main persona is recently retired. This initial research can help you strategize to work smarter.
You can take your marketing one step further

Knowing your personas’ needs, how they behave, and what a relevant experience looks like is just the tip of the iceberg. From there you can get into more complex and relevant marketing.

We’re talking about digging deeper into segmenting email lists, creating form content that helps you identify the user’s persona before you even contact them, and even creating new products and services targeted at your existing buyers.

It sounds like a lot of planning before even starting your work, but it pays off in the end. If you want to talk research and strategy, you’ve come to the right place. Contact us to find out more about what you need to think about before planning your marketing materials.