Why would you take a scattergun approach to your marketing, burning through your budget with untargeted content, when you have the option to take a refined approach?
Marketing is becoming an increasingly data-driven discipline, and this even extends to content marketing. An accurate buyer persona will guide your thinking and focus your overall marketing strategy. This will allow you to get your small businesses in front of relevant prospects.
Segmenting Your Target Audience with Buyer Personas
In order to clearly define various buyer personas for your business, you’ll need data.
To do so, you have to have some skin in the game. Running ads, website and social media analytics, market research, and client surveys are great ways to begin the process of building a detailed picture of your customers.
It’s going to take some time to build up valuable customer data. However, keep in mind that creating buyer personas and segmenting your audience is an ongoing exercise. Therefore, it should be revisited periodically. Effective marketing is about relevance. Calibrating your existing buyer personas and adding new ones over time will allow you to increase the relevance of your content.
Buyer personas allow you to tailor your content to various segments of your audience and deliver the most impactful marketing messages. This will result in a more targeted marketing strategy and improved conversions.
Creating Accurate Buyer Personas
1. Identify Sources of Data about Your Customers
Start by identifying sources of data about your customers. This is a context-dependent exercise that will differ in design from one business to the next. For example, the type of data a small accountancy firm holds about their customers will differ from the data that an e-commerce store selling vintage clothes holds on theirs.
There’s no limit to your data gathering efforts other than the time and resources you’re willing to allocate. High-quality data will allow you to build incredibly detailed and accurate buyer personas. That makes customer surveys, form completions, and sign-ups from competitions, promotions, or high-value content offerings extremely valuable.
Larger companies will often contract market research agencies to conduct focus groups and phone interviews in order to gather qualitative data. Those types of processes are probably unrealistic for independent entrepreneurs and small businesses, though. However, there are other sources of raw data, that you have immediate access to:
- Existing customer databases
- Demographic data
- Popular products or services
- Repeat customers
- E-mail subscribers
- Which e-mails are customers engaging with?
- Advertising analytics
- Are certain ads performing better than others?
- What inferences can you make from this?
- Website analytics data
- Demographics data
- Content that customers have engaged with
- Social media
- Which content/topics have earned the most engagement?
- Customer surveys and feedback
2. Organize Your Data into Categories
Once you’ve decided on the sources of the raw data, it’s time to organize the data. Then, you can begin the process of identifying patterns, and categorizing customers into the groups that will form the basis of the various buyer personas for your business.
- Demographic Data
- Age
- Sex
- Location
- Occupation
- Relationships & Family
- Identifiers
- Lifestyle
- Interests
- Device used
- Marketing channel engaged with
- Goals/Challenges
- What motivated your customers to choose your business?
- Which problem do you solve?
- What do your customers say about your company, e.g. value for money or perceived qualities in comparison to competitors?
Leverage Your Buyer Personas With Conversion Pathways
The key takeaway that I’d like you to take from this article is this: prospects are more likely to engage with content that is relevant to their own situation.
It seems obvious but not many small businesses have the foresight or will to pursue a strategy of contextual content marketing i.e. creating content with a specific buyer persona in mind. After all, it takes a lot more effort to identify separate buyer personas within your target market and then produce content targeted at each group.
To offer your buyer personas relevant content, it’s necessary to design a conversion pathway. Conversion pathways are essentially content funnels designed for specific buyer personas with each successive stage building on the previous one.
Buyer personas and conversion pathways build upon each other. This process is essentially the Fluid Prototyping Approach to effective content marketing. The idea is to leverage your buyer personas to create a conversion pathway that will then act as a means to refine the buyer persona it was designed for.
By documenting how your prospects choose to engage with your content, conversion pathways confirm the interests and challenges of your prospects as well as the problems they’re looking to solve.
Bringing It All Together
So you see, accurate buyer personas rely on data, and data relies on buyers. Conversion pathways are a great way to test your hypotheses, in regards to buyer personas, whilst simultaneously refining your buyer personas.
When you create targeted content and include it within a conversion pathway, you not only gather data from form completions from prospects accessing gated content offerings but also from the choices that prospects make within the conversion pathway.
Effective marketing and healthy conversion rates rely on a determined process of refinement. Use data to create your buyer personas and then refine those buyer personas by leveraging conversion pathways.
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