You’ve successfully defined your potential clients. Congrats! It’s definitely an accomplishment worth celebrating. However, just because you have your buyer persona complete, the work is not done.
Now that you have your buyers defined, it’s time to implement what you’ve learned into your marketing strategy! How do you do that?
Let’s walk through 5 ways you can use persona to optimize their marketing value.
1 . IDENTIFY PROSPECTS
To best market to your prospects, you will need to know which buyer persona definition they fall into. While this isn’t an exact science, you can employ a few tricks to figure this out. Creating clever polls, asking questions on social media, and tracking clicks to your website content helps to segment your audience across various platforms.
As you build your email marketing list, have your prospects self-identify by using an extra question on your sign-up form. For example, if you are selling school supplies, you can add a drop-down answer: “I am a parent, teacher, or student.” Once you’ve segmented your list accordingly, you can create all kinds of personalized experiences for your prospect!
2 . CREATE ENGAGING, DYNAMIC CONTENT
One of the most important benefits of defining your buyer personas is that you will now be able to serve them specialized content according to their preferences. Remember, when defining your personas, you listed their likes, dislikes, wants, and desires. You know them well enough now to give them what they are looking for.
When planning your social media posts, emails, blog posts, or any other marketing materials, you will always want to ask yourself a question: Who is this content for, and does it speak strongly to them?
Tip: Always make sure that your content is addressing a pain point or a problem your buyer persona is facing. Your personas are seeking answers to these questions, and through your content, you can present your product or service as the solution.
3 . COMMUNICATE WITH PERSONAS ON PREFERRED CHANNELS
Even with all of the changes in marketing over the years, there is still one thing that holds true: Go where your customers are. When researching your personas, you should have learned where your customers are hanging out online. For example, imagine you defined your buyer persona as a married, 40-year-old female, who has 2 kids. You even gave her a name – Soccer Mom Sally.
Given her stats, we know Sally is hanging out on Facebook. Don’t worry about creating content for Twitter because Sally isn’t on Twitter. Now that you know who you’re targeting, spend your time wisely and invest it in Facebook.
Tip: You don’t need to give up on other channels completely. However, think about simple ways you can repurpose your primary content without investing too much time and creativity.
4 . USE THE LINGO YOUR PERSONA USES
Once you know who your persona is, where they hang out, and how they communicate, you can start using their lingo when serving up their content.
When writing blog posts, social media captions, emails, or any communication, think about the buzzwords your persona is using. Use slang that they use. Show that you are part of the community where they exist and speak their language.
5 . WRITE BLOG POSTS WITH YOUR BUYER PERSONA IN MIND
Now that you’re speaking their language, your blog posts can become a long-form answer to your persona’s burning questions. For in-depth topics, create how-to guides and include downloadable content like a checklist, worksheet, or case study in exchange for an email address.
Remember to be a resource — answering the “one” thing your persona wants to know. You can easily share that content on the channels that you’ve previously determined to be where everyone is hanging out.
And, if you’ve done a good job segmenting your marketing list, you can send your blog post to only those personas that would be interested in reading it.
Brilliant!
PULLING IT ALL TOGETHER
You have your created buyer personas, now is the time to put them to work. Putting in the hard work to develop personas along with a strategy for how to use them will help increase your traffic, leads, and ultimately sales for your business. From social copy to blog posts, sending the right message to the right people at the right time is the best way to get the most value from your audience.
Don’t have a clue on how to create a buyer persona and incorporate them into your marketing? Schedule a time to talk with us about how we can help you create a smarter strategy!
