Are you using buyer personas as part of your digital marketing campaigns? If not, you may be missing out on the chance to reach your ideal customer on a deeper and more meaningful level. Buyer personas are an integral part of marketing automation personalisation, helping you identify and target customers.

This strategy is very effective as a way to segment your customers according to personal information and online behaviour. When you create data-rich personas, you have the ability to gain insight into paint points, challenges and struggles of your core audience.

In this way, personas could be thought of as data-driven customer stereotypes that help you create highly personalised, effective digital marketing campaigns.

What are Personas and How Do They Help Your Digital Marketing Efforts?

Essentially, personas act as a snapshot of your target customers who may utilise your service or product. Each persona represents a certain type of customer, who has specific interests, preferences and pain points.

You could focus your personas on their job title, or you could put more focus on the core goals of each persona and how your business helps each specific goal. Ideally, data is used across a wide range of sources, which could be anything from government data such as employment statistics, census data, salary figures for specific job roles, social media groups and analytics from your website and social pages that tells you how people find you online.

You can add additional details to each persona, which could including anything from similar products and service that may be used, businesses and causes they support, social media networks they favour, devices they use and any other information that helps you gain a bigger picture of your customers. As you start to build your personas, you will start to determine the unique challenges that each type of customer may face.

For example, an organic kids clothing company may have a stay at home mom who wants her children to wear natural fabrics that are easy to wash, a busy mom who does not have time to shop at traditional stores and a mom who is passionate about the environment, who wants her children to wear only natural fibres.

Some additional insights that you may want to add to your personas include the following:

• Priority initiatives. Why would certain customers want what you are offering?
• Success factors. What results do your customers hope to achieve when purchasing your product or service?
• Perceived barriers. What are the main concerns that your audience may have in regards to your products or service?
• Buyer’s journey. What would have the biggest influence on your customer's journey as they look at their options and make a buying decision?
• Decision criteria. What aspects of similar or competing products or services would your customers see as being important, and what are their common expectations?

How Your Digital Marketing Campaigns Benefit from Buyer Personas

The primary purpose of personas is to identify common pain points that may prevent your target customer from becoming a paying customer. While this also helps you craft your ideal customer, you will be using the personas to reduce barriers to purchase.

Let's use the example of our natural kids' clothing line. One of your personas may want to dress their kids in natural fabrics but they may not have a large disposable income. Your pricing may be a major barrier for this customer. You can use your persona to create unique content in the form of emails, landing pages, blog posts and even social media content highlighting the value that natural fibres offer from a cost perspective. Your clothing line may offer long-lasting clothing that will not easily wear out. Your sizes may be a bit roomier than most thanks to the unique style of the clothing, which means that kids can wear the clothing longer.

You may illustrate the benefit of handing down clothing to younger siblings. You may share tips on how to achieve a smaller capsule wardrobe for kids to avoid waste. This content is targeted towards a challenge in a way that helps remove purchase barriers. Customers who fall into this segment are then reassured that there is value in your clothing, even if it is a bit more costly than chain store clothing.

Ultimately, it becomes far easier to plan personalised content and automated sequences and messages that address the primary needs of your target customers. Some of the ways that buyer personas help you improve your digital marketing campaigns include the following:

‍Substantial customer insights

‍Because buyer personas are rooted in data rather than fiction, you will have the benefit of rich, deep insight into your customers that can be used to add value to your campaigns across the board. Quantitative information such as demographics and customer browsing behaviour is aligned with qualitative data that can be sourced from interviews, feedback and other sources to give you a great deal of insight into your customers. This helps you determine how to relate to your audience and approach them in a way that is designed to convert. You will have the insight needed to plan email campaigns, mobile campaigns, lead funnels and various other communication strategies that are designed according to your customer's needs and pain points.

‍Personalised content

‍Personalised content is good for you and your customers. It helps to take customers on their journey, driving loyalty, engaging on a meaningful level and retaining customers. You will be able to create content that is genuinely interesting, informative and useful to your customers, rather than content that does not address any specific need or challenge. When you know your customers' struggles, you can craft resources that help them find solutions to their problems. As a result, you will be able to forge far better relationships over time.

‍Relevant, real-time messaging

‍You also have the ability to plan triggered email campaigns that are designed to target customers while they are still engaged and focused. You can create triggers based on email subscription, abandoned carts, completed order forms and various other actions. You can also leverage data on transaction or purchase history, age, gender and various other factors. This helps you create highly relevant messages that are also sent in real-time, increasing the chance of conversion and engagement

‍Accurate customer journey mapping

‍A huge part of digital marketing is sending the right message to the right person at the right time. Buyer personas make this possible by allowing to map out an extremely targeted customer journey. You then have the ability to target your audience at each key stage of their journey. Even if customers are all at the same stage, they do not always have the same challenges. Your stay at home mom may have very different challenges compared to your eco-conscious mom and your budget-conscious mom. All of these moms can still be customers, however. When they have clear personas that map out their journeys at each stage, it is far easier to craft content designed to target each stage of the journey, whether it is awareness, consideration or decision.

With the help of marketing automation tools from Grapevine Interactive, creating buyer personas and crafting highly personalised digital marketing campaigns is easier than ever. Contact us today to learn more about our tailored digital marketing solutions.