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Marketing to Your Buyer Personas

Written by: Corte Swearingen

Article Overview: The idea behind creating a buyer persona is to understand the wants and needs of a common group of people. Once you understand what's important to any particular customer group, you stand a much better chance of getting them to act on a marketing communication.

Marketing to Your Buyer Personas

A Buyer Persona is a group of people that share similar demographics and interests. In the 1996 Presidential election, the Clinton campaign went after a group of voters they felt were the key to the election – the Soccer Mom.

The idea behind creating a buyer persona is to understand the wants and needs of a common group of people. Once you understand what's important to any particular customer group, you stand a much better chance of getting them to act on a marketing communication.

Defining the most prominent buyer personas for your target market is essential to understanding their specific needs and wants. Your marketing communications can be better targeted if they speak to the problems and issues experienced by your various personas.

Let’s look at an example. Suppose you own a roofing company that targets commercial roofing jobs. By looking at your various customers, you realize you can group them into the following personas.

• Real Estate Property Managers
• Commercial Building Supervisors
• Office Building Managers
• Institutional Building Managers (schools, hospitals, etc.)

Each of these customer groups may have specific needs as it relates to roofing maintenance, replacement and repair. By learning as much as you can about these customer groups, you can better focus your core marketing message and promotional offers for building trust, credibility and profits.

You may find your business only has a couple of buyer personas or you may find you have a dozen or so. The quantity is not important. What is important is your ability to define them clearly.

Defining Your Buyer Personas
The key to defining your buyer personas is to look at your customer data and find ways to group common characteristics. Pull up your favorite word processing program and start writing short biographies on your customer personas. Break your customers down into well defined buying categories as best you can. You don't have to be perfect here, just do the best job with the current data you have. Buyer persona profiles can contain age, gender, income level, occupation, education level, hobbies, and anything else you can think of.

If you're a B-to-B company, then it may make better sense for you to create corporate personas instead of buyer personas. A corporate persona can segment based on industry, number of employees, revenue levels, and any other characteristic that applies to your business.

Once you have defined your buyer persona categories, the next step is to actually write a short biography on each one. You are not describing any one particular customer, but a composite of all customers that make up that persona.

My website is designed for home-based and small business owners that want to increase their profits using strategic marketing techniques. Here’s an example of one of my buyer personas. Note that I have given the persona a title and have written a short composite biography.

The Local Brick-and-Mortar Business Owner
The Local Business Owner has a small business storefront in their community that does well. They are relatively happy with their earnings but have this nagging feeling that business could be double what it is now. They feel that they could market their business more but are reluctant to spend lots of money on direct mail. While they currently have a website, it is more of a static entity rather than a proactive tool in growing their business. They would love to start a comprehensive marketing program but need to be assured that their investment would produce the required results.

The Self-Starting WAHM
The Self-Starting WAHM is the creative Work-At-Home-Mom that has a small internet business she runs part-time. While she has done a great job and getting her business off the ground, she realizes that she needs help optimizing her web pages for the search engines and testing new offers to see which ones perform the best. With her limited work schedule, she knows she needs help but is hesitant to invest a large amount of money hiring a consultant.

In the above two examples, do you see how I might change my marketing message depending on whether I was communicating to The Local Brick-and-Mortar Business Owner as opposed to the Self-Starting WAHM? My core marketing message and call-to-action would be very different.

You’re never quite done crafting your personas. As you learn more about your customers through surveys and other forms of feedback, you’ll be able to better define and create compelling messages that will connect directly with the needs and wants of each group.

Take the time to learn and build upon your Buyer Personas. It’s truly the first step in creating targeted high-impact communications.

Related Articles
  Buyer Personas are the Foundation upon which Demand Generation is Built
  The crazy, complex world of B2B marketing today
  David Meerman Scott talks about thought leadership
  What is Lead Nurturing?
  Using Buyer Personas in B2B Marketing

Article Tags: better chance, building managers, building supervisors, building trust, clinton campaign, commercial roofing, core marketing, customer data, customer group, customer groups, marketing communication, marketing communications, presidential election, real estate property managers, roofing company, roofing maintenance, soccer mom, supervisors office, target market, word processing program



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