You may be tempted to skip this step and guess as to who your audience should be. Stop! Developing buyer personas is crucial to a proper inbound marketing strategy. A detailed buyer persona will:
Align Your Company as a Whole. From the content marketers to the sales people, to the web designers- everyone should know who the target audience is. If everyone has access to and is working toward reaching the same potential customers, everyone in your company is striving toward achieving the same goal. Don’t let your writers create content for retired couples while your designers create web pages to catch Millennials. Attracting new visitors, converting those leads, and making the final sale is a lot easier when everyone is working together instead of competing.
Allow You to Focus Your Time. Your resources are limited, including your time. Focusing your efforts on the right perspective customers is the best way to send your ROI through the roof. Blog posts that don’t get views and unproductive sales calls all represent wasted man hours, and your efforts going toward the wrong audience.
Personalize Your Marketing. Instead of sending out the same e-mail to every lead, developing detailed buyer personas allows you to segment your audience. A tailored message is much more personalized and, therefore, likely to get clicked on. If you take the time to create these personas and tailor your message to answer their pain points, you’ll see much higher sales productivity.
Guide Product Development. Once you find out who is looking for your services and why, it’s much easier to plan for the future. It’s possible during the process of developing the personas, you will come across a common challenge you are not currently helping them solve, but could be. Maybe you will uncover a shopping preference you did not think of on your own and can expand into, like a new social media platform.
The good news is, these important buyer personas aren't that difficult to create. You just need to ask the right questions to the right people and present that information in a helpful way so the people in your business can get to know your persona or personas. To learn more about how to create buyer personas, you can download our free Inbound Marketing eBook.