Using Buyer Personas to Focus Your Marketing Efforts

After putting in the work to discover who your perfect customers are and creating buyer personas, it’s time to put them to work for you. After all, your time and effort will only be worth it if you can improve your marketing accordingly. So now that you’ve come up with your imaginary ideal buyers, here’s how you can use them to reach your real buyers.

Segment Your Current Customers and Leads Into Lists

Using your preferred CRM, create lists based on your buyer personas. This will include different stages of where your leads are in the buying process, but it should also include demographics, buyer motivations, and other factors that influence buying patterns for your business.

By segmenting your contacts into lists, you can ensure they only get marketing emails and calls that are the most relevant to them. This is especially important for businesses with a wide range of buyer personas, such as grocery stores, auto repair shops, or healthcare clinics.

Target Your Ads Using Buyer Personas

When you create paid ads online, you’ll have the option of how to target your ads. When you’ve generated buyer personas, this is one of the main things you will use them for.

For example, if your business is local, you’ll want to make sure your paid ads pop up only in the region that makes sense for your market. You can also isolate the neighborhoods most likely to contain your target buyer personas based on what you know about the demographics. If you know your apparel line mostly appeals to affluent buyers, you’ll likely want to target ads for new fashion line releases in higher-income neighborhoods. On the other hand, you may want to focus your ads on middle-income areas when you advertise clearance sales.

Refine Your Messaging

Your buyer personas will largely end up defining your brand and the tone of your messaging across all marketing channels. So when you gather insights from analytics, surveys, and other market research methods, you’ll gain a powerful understanding of how to refine your ads, social media captions, and videos.

Adjust Your Business Model

When done right, market research gives you insights into how you can gain an edge on competing businesses. Not only will your research help make your buyer personas more specific, but it can also help you discover new ones you didn’t know were there.

For example, you could find that there’s a growing community of rock climbers in your local market that wishes they could find climbing gear more easily. If you own a sports supplies store, this could be a great opportunity to expand your offerings to include more climbing gear.

Conversely, updated research could reveal that some of your buyer personas are disappearing and being replaced. This will help you trim any unnecessary marketing efforts and focus more on the real buyers you know are out there based on your new buyer personas.

Creating accurate depictions of your ideal clients can be time consuming, but when you start using buyer personas to focus your marketing efforts, you will find it was time well spent.