Successful Marketing depends on personalization. When you develop a deeper understanding of your customers, you can customize communications based on what and how they buy.

Persona based marketing helps you provide structure and insight to your company’s inbound marketing campaigns. Using market research and existing customer data, you can define your ideal customer in a very detailed manner. Buyer Personas incorporate customer demographics, behavior, motivations, and goals. With this information, you can decide how best to focus your time, energy, and budget to attract the most valuable buyers.

Leveraging persona based marketing also helps with product development and functional alignment within your company. When done properly, you can fully understand the buyer’s journey and create impactful, targeted content along the way.

Making a Case for Persona Based Marketing

Are buyer personas essential to your inbound marketing campaigns? Will they help you bring more of your best customers on board?

Recent studies concluded that using marketing personas made websites two-to-five times easier to use. Results also found behaviorally-targeted ads were twice as effective than non-targeted ads. Also, personalized emails produced an impressive 18 times more revenue than broadcast emails.

Buyers are 48% more likely to consider solution providers that personalize their marketing and address specific customer issues. In fact, after adding persona based marketing, one company experienced a 171% increase in marketing-generated revenue, a 111% growth in email open rate, and a 100% increase in the number of pages visited.

How to Develop Buyer Personas

The number of marketing personas your company develops will depend on your industry and business model. Some businesses create two personas; others might have 20. The process for creating buyer personas involves several types of research findings. Considering secondary market research, primary research, and market trends provide the basis for developing persona based marketing.

In addition to the research you conduct using reliable third-party sources, make sure you gather data directly from customer surveys and interviews. Capturing demographic and behavioral information from lead forms and interactive content will strengthen your marketing personas. Also, your sales team can add valuable input regarding prospect quality and typical sales cycles.

Specifically, you want to find out how your existing customers:

• Navigate the buying process.
• Learn about your product or service.
• Engage with your company before their purchase.
• Consume your content.

Your goal after researching is to create a comprehensive description of your ideal buyer including demographic, behavioral, and lifestyle information. You want to learn job titles, responsibilities, income, family dynamics, company size, industry, geographic location, and budgets. Also, understand what challenges and pain points they face, as well as the role they play in purchasing decisions.

Persona Based Marketing a Must for the Multi-Buyer B2B Sale

Selling to business-to-business (B2B) customers typically involves a more complicated process. You usually will encounter several decision makers during the sales cycle, each with different personas. The size of the buying team directly correlates to the size of the deal. The more a company invests in a purchase, the larger the buying team you will likely face.

So, your content must address each buyer’s diverse goals, interests, priorities, preferences, and requirements. Your buying team may consist of the company president, functional VPs, CFO, staff members, and users.

For campaign success, you need to create personas for everyone participating in the buying decision. You can then create content that speaks to each buyer persona at the different stages of their journey. When you influence the right people in the right way, you increase your chances of closing the sale.

A typical buying journey in a B2B sale involves three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision-making. Each member of the buying team will go through these stages at different times and in distinct ways. As a B2B marketer, your job is to tailor your content to each member of the buying team during each of these stages.

Taking Target Marketing to New Levels

Traditional demographic marketing involves a population too vast and diverse to target. Persona based marketing makes better sense. It lets you target on a more granular level and helps you find your most valuable customers. By streamlining your marketing strategy, you avoid wasting time and money on unqualified leads.

About KEO Marketing

KEO Marketing Inc., a leading marketing agency based in Phoenix, Arizona, develops and implements strategies to help clients significantly increase leads and sales.

For more information and to request a complimentary consultation, contact us today.