Spotlight: Why are buyer personas really important?

Call them your ‘target market’, ‘target audience’ or ‘buyer persona’ – nailing down who your ideal customer is, plays a pivotal role in the direction and success of any marketing campaign.

Despite the importance of completing such research, a report by the Buyer Persona Institute found that only 44% of organisations had a buyer persona, and 83% of these respondents believed their research was only “somewhat” effective. Clearly there is a chasm of what best practice looks like too.

Understanding the importance of buyer personas

According to HubSpot, buyer personas “are fictional, generalised representations of your ideal customers. They help you to better understand your prospective customers, and make it easier for you to tailor content to their specific needs, behaviours, and challenges.”

While traditional target market research can sometimes be vague and lacking direction, buyer persona research is focused on the detail – giving you more information to base your marketing decisions on. If you’re planning to create and run an inbound marketing campaign, the importance of doing thorough buyer persona research cannot be underestimated.

Buyer personas form the core of any digital marketing or inbound marketing campaign. As well as focusing your efforts on reaching the right person to buy or sell your products, the research you undertake will inform your decisions on:

• The blogs you write - The challenges your persona faces can be turned into articles by your company - the ones who can offer the solution.
• The social media platform you use - There's no point posting on Facebook if your personas spends two hours per day on LinkedIn and nothing more.
• The offers you promote - Does your persona need a lot of convincing of what you can do? Testimonials or case study packs are great offers to showcase your expertise

Create personas in moderation

Depending on your business model, depends on the amount of buyer personas you eventually look to create and target. While small businesses may be content with two personas, large organisations may need up to 20. The tip for any business starting their first persona is to focus on just one to begin with and develop new personas if required at a later date.

Remember to think about negative personas too! Concentrating your efforts on who you don’t want, helps you not waste time and effort marketing to them in the future.

Creating your own buyer personas

Starting from scratch on who your persona is, can be a little challenging but massively rewarding too. To help you on your journey to creating, or re-assessing your ideal customer, here at Katapult we’ve created a free guide and template that we’ve called The buyer persona bible.

To get more tips on targeting your ideal customer and begin to build your persona using the interactive template, download The buyer persona bible today.

Photo Credit: Pixabay