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The marketing world is filled with several individuals who claim to be marketing gurus but end up wasting your marketing budget on the wrong audience. This is synonymous with doing the right thing at the wrong time. If your customers find it hard to understand the message behind your brand, then it merely means your marketing or content is not aligned with your customers. This will create a serious need to create a buyer profile or persona to assist you in redefining your target audience. To gain a perfect understanding of the subject matter at hand, let us start by explaining the terms ‘buyer persona’ and how they can be incorporated in your marketing impound efforts.
Buyer persona in simple terms refers to the basic representation of your target market. This is more like a fictional customer who has met all the requirements to act like the real ones. The persona is expected to exhibit the characteristics such as likes and dislikes, lifestyle and every other attribute of your customers. While this is good, there is just one thing that ruins the entire idea, and that is creating personas without conducting proper research.
In this article, we shall be looking at some important points on how companies can align their buyer personas with an inbound marketing strategy for improved sales and client-customer relationship.
1. Conduct a Good Research
Remember we have established the fact that buyer personas are not built based on assumptions. Once you build your persona around mere speculatio.sns, there is a great tendency it will never align with your marketing strategies. The very first thing that you need to be sure of is the integrity of your researcher. Is the researcher’s reputation trustworthy in building these buyer personas? One thing you should bear in mind while creating buyer personas is that the data published by your researcher may be subject to bias and perspective which may affect the end result of the research thus shaping your buyer persona and inbound leads.
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In creating a buyer persona that is aligned with your marketing inbound, your researcher should be able to be:
- Able to have a neutral approach to things. They should be able to use their experience and interactions while keeping sentiments aside.
- Well experienced in a field under study. Engage the services of only researchers that are knowledgeable about the field since this is the only way you can obtain good results.
- Have a different approach to things. The researcher should be able to judge the customers’ behaviour and generate the right results which are not based on their own perspectives but on the findings of the research.
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2. Know Your Candidates
This refers to the candidates who will be researched and interviewed by your team of researchers. When building a buyer persona that will be aligned with your inbound marketing leads we suggest you carry out an entire ground research.
Some individuals that can be used as interview candidates are listed below:
- Third-party networks
- The referrals
- Future prospects
- Current customers
These individuals can be interviewed to generate enough information on the nature of the buyer persona.
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3. What are the interview questions?
During your interview session with prospective candidates, you will be required to answer some series of questions to assist you to create a buyer persona that will be aligned with the inbound marketing strategy.
According to John Waldron, here are some important data that needs to be provided during your interviews.
- Age
- Annual income
- Career aims
- Career path
- Children
- Education
- Gender
- Industry
- Job role/title
- Location
- Marital status
- Preferred social network(s)
- Seniority within company
- Size of company
- What are the tools/skills required to do your job?
- What publications do you read?
- What’s a typical day for you
You can also discuss some other pain points of the buyers which will assist you in digging out more information from the market before entering into it.
You need to take note of the type of content you provide in order to maintain your leads. The buyer persona that is aligned with your inbound marketing leads is one that is created after a serious research into the behaviour of the customer. The more you research on the behaviours of your clients the better and easier it would be for you to hit identify the right customer on time.
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