Check out our 30 second recap of this post here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylX3U8L5IJY
You’ve no doubt heard of dining in the dark - but if you haven’t let me enlighten you. You choose to eat at a restaurant without the ability to see your food, server, or dining partner. It’s pretty adventurous because you aren’t able to focus your eyes on anything and you have no clue if your meal is pretty, or not. You’re hoping by using your other senses that you’ll be able to make it all work and not leave hungry or covered in your food. Buyer personas act like the eyes of your marketing team, and if you can’t provide focus, your marketing efforts are being wasted and may likely end up on your shirt. In order to be seen by your ideal audience online, you have to show up where they already are. How do you do that?
Buyer Personas 101
Buyer personas are your business’s make-believe avatars that represent one to three of your ideal customers. These should be comprehensive pictures based on past experience, market research, and demographics. They show your marketing team where they should focus their efforts and messaging.
If you’re marketing to everyone, you’re marketing to no one.
The Trickle Down Effect
Often a big miss with businesses is that they don’t invest the time crafting buyer personas. You know what really suffers? Your sales pipeline. Nothing makes your sales team grumpier than when they receive leads that aren’t qualified.
Just like car dealerships don’t sell every type of car to everybody, you shouldn’t try to market to everyone either. They use market segmentation to find customers, and so can you.Your company marketing strategy funnel starts with personas and ends with personas. This one piece actually helps your entire company to laser focus their efforts and investments to attract, retain, and delight those you’re serving time and again.
Don’t Set and Forget Your Personas
We’re all guilty of working really hard on something, and taking a break. Come on, we deserved it! At first, it seems hard to justify the ROI of developing your marketing personas. Once it’s done, everyone celebrates and feels amazing for getting on the same page. Then, before you know it, a year or two has passed without a second look at whether your ideal customer is still ideal. They’re changing, why shouldn’t you?We spent a large part of our last quarterly meeting discussing this exact situation, and refined our personas even further based on what we had learned in the last year.
Personas are like plants and need to be tended to. Plan some time to review them with your team, or look for support outside of your organization, if buyer marketing personas are tripping you up. Contact us for a consultation to see if your buyer personas could use a little love.
Key takeaways:
• If you’re marketing to everyone, you’re marketing to no one
• Marketing teams need focus or the effort, time, and money is wasted
• Sales teams get grumpy when leads aren’t qualified
• Building buyer personas is a lot of work, but the payoff is huge in the long run
• Personas are like plants and need to be tended to
Work Habits & Productivity
Jay, the CEO of StringCan, oversees strategy and vision, building culture that makes going into work something he looks forward to, recruiting additional awesome team members to help exceed clients goals, leading the team and allocating where StringCan invests time and money.
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