Aspire Digital

Before you start your next marketing campaign, ask yourself: “Who exactly are the people I am trying to reach and what are their characteristics?” By trying to reach too diverse an audience you will end up reaching no-one, so a little time spent identifying you’re the type of clients you want will pay dividends in the long run.
Regardless of what industry you are in, it is important to establish ‘buyer personas’ for your business so you can segment your audience and create stronger marketing campaigns.
Buyer Personas
A ‘buyer persona’ is a semi fictional representation of your ideal customer. The way you identify your ideal customer is through the following:
• Sales Rep feedback
• Customer conversations
• Market research
• Website analytics
The most important of these is ‘Customer conversations’, because the cohort best placed to tell you what a real buyer would like is a real buyer who has already bought.
Benefits to Marketing
The benefits to your marketing campaign of having clearly defined buyer persona are as follows:
• Focus your marketing efforts
• Create more helpful content
• Align your organisation
At Aspire Digital, we have devised a number of templates that will help you build your buyer personas, so if you’re not sure how to build them speak to us today and we will guide you through it.
Two key elements of the templates we have designed are Priority Initiatives and Perceived Barriers:
1. Priority Initiatives: Identify the three problems or objectives that the buyer persona designates as highest priority.
2. Perceived Barriers: For each of these three problems or objectives identified above, detail the steps the buyer persona has already taken towards solving these and why those steps failed.
Mistakes
So, what are the typical mistakes that marketers make when developing and using buyer personas as the basis for marketing strategies?
1. They make up things about the buyers. The only way to gather clear, unexpected insights about how your buyers make decisions is to have a conversation with them. If marketing is going to benefit from buyer persona development, you will need to uncover specific insights that are unknown to your competitors or anyone inside your company. This information will tell you exactly what you need to do to deliver a product or service that persuades buyers to choose you.
2. They get distracted by trivial matters. It makes no difference to a buyer’s decision whether your logo is purple or yellow. Focus on what solves the buyer’s problems, not what impresses your mother.
3. They develop too many buyer personas. Of course, every individual or company has unique characteristics and you could, in theory, have a buyer persona for every one of them. But your focus should be on identifying the key characteristics that define your ideal buyer and then segmenting these individuals or companies into discrete groups.
4. They use a scripted text to interview their buyers. The problem with this is that the results are not sufficiently detailed to facilitate a proper definition of your ideal client. The key to success in developing a buyer persona is asking probing questions based on your buyer’s answers. So, drop the scripted text and get involved in a conversation instead.
Avoid these four mistakes and your buyers’ needs will be the focus of your marketing strategies and tactics.
It’s very easy to get carried away with all the great marketing initiatives you want to implement and the things you want to accomplish, but before you start your Google advertising or firing out aimless Tweets, just make sure you have defined exactly who you want to attract. If you don’t know where you’re going, you have no chance of getting there!
Want to learn more about how to build your Buyer Personas? Contact us today for a free consultation. info@AspireDigital.ie

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