When planning your inbound marketing strategy, an important first step is to create buyer personas that represent your target customers within your target market.
You may have more than one type of customer, and each one requires its own buyer persona. Defining a buyer persona arms you with the information you need to communicate with your buyers in a way that’s meaningful to them.
Along with keyword research, this process lays the foundation for your ongoing inbound marketing activity.
What is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a detailed description of a specific individual who is the ideal customer for your products or services. The description should contain the following characteristics:
- Name
- Age
- Gender
- Educational background
- Role at company
- Professional goals
- Biggest pain points at work
- Personal interests
Example Buyer Persona
If you worked for a company that sold IT consulting services and your target market was IT professionals in the pharmaceutical industry, one buyer persona could be Mike the Manager.
Mike is a married, 43 year old with 3 kids who graduated from third-tier college in the midwest. He’s worked for the company for 10 years starting as a programmer and is now the manager of a 15 person development team. He enjoys being a manager of a development team, and he’s not interested in playing politics to reach more executive level positions.
His biggest challenges at work are having to constantly put out fires and dealing with changing priorities from the business owners which frustrates him because it upsets his staffing and resource plans.
He loves watching professional baseball and football and coaching his kids’ peewee football and little league teams. Mike thinks he knows a lot about technology, but in reality, is always a little behind the curve or doesn’t quite have his facts straight.
Why Create Buyer Personas?
For a marketer or salesperson, a buyer persona represents the ideal individual who needs to be reached by your inbound marketing message and helped through the lead development pipeline. The individuals represented by the buyer persona are the audience for which you are creating all of your inbound marketing content including website pages, blog postings, call to action buttons, landing pages, ebooks, videos, and webinars.
It’s necessary to define the buyer persona ahead of time so you and others can be consistent when creating these various forms of content and everyone is aligned with who the target customer is during the marketing and sales process.
When building your inbound marketing plan, be sure to clearly define your buyer personas. It will help keep your message consistent and allow you to better visualize your target customer when executing specific marketing tactics.
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