Making buyer personas actionable

Four easy-to-incorporate processes to execute a more persona-based marketing strategy.

Buyer Personas, via HubSpot, are the semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers based on both market research and real data about your existing customer base.

So, my target market? Not quite. Go deeper than that. Yes, understand the demographics and geographics, but get as thorough as you can with their assumed thoughts, behaviors, goals, challenges, patterns, KPI’s, and their definitions of success and ROI.

I bolded challenges because that element of your buyer persona profile may arguably be the most important. What are your personas’ biggest pain points? What keeps them up at night, unable to fall asleep? Having a firm grasp on this “challenges” section will help you build out a relevant, search-friendly, and impactful content strategy.

But more on that in a few.

Here’s a brief checklist on how to make your buyer personas actionable today:

Give visitors a chance to self-identify.

In every form you have on your website — including content landing pages, contact us pages, consultation requests, etc — include a drop-down field that assigns the user to one of your personas.

“Which of the following best describes your current situation?”

“What is your role at your current company?”

“What is your biggest marketing challenge?”

“How would you describe yourself?”

Working persona self-identification into your contact forms as a required field can be a double win: you get an additional layer of segmentation for your database and you remove the manual steps needed to assign personas to individual contacts.

Curate persona-specific content offers.

Do you have buyer personas across multiple verticals or industries? Job titles? Services needed? Use the differences in your buyer personas to map out gaps in your current content offer landscape.

Create case studies for each industry you target. Have separate tip-sheets or ebooks available for both CMO’s and Marketing Managers. The ideal, robust inbound strategy is the one that has content offers available for each targeted buyer persona at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

Leverage contextual marketing for each persona.

If you have a contact database appropriately labeled by persona, as mentioned above, this opens the door for effective, highly-focused segmentation options. If you have an email marketing send upcoming and in the works, why not personalize the content within by persona.

Imagine the performance improvement for an email send that delivers CTA A directly to Persona A, CTA B to Persona B, and CTA C to Persona C. If you segment recipients by persona, you can ensure that users only ever see content that is incredibly relevant to them.

Champion a persona-driven blog strategy.

“Blogging just to blog” is the worst thing you can do.

Well, technically not having a blog would be the worst. But blogging should always be motivated and produced with your personas in mind.

“What are my personas biggest challenges? Pain-points? Why can’t they fall asleep at night?”

Turn the answers to those questions into blog topics. If these are truly the biggest challenges your personas face, chances are they are going to Google for help. And you want to show up with the answers.

NOTE: The step between topic generation and actual blog production should always be keyword research. Consider this flow chart:

Buyer persona development
What are their challenges??
Plug challenge-based keywords (short- and long-tailed; synonyms and variations) into your keyword research tool
Identify strong topics
Write blogs and optimize appropriately
Drive potential persona-fits to your website via organic traffic

Buyer personas, target markets, ideal customers: these don’t have to be strictly theoretical. By introducing these practical processes into your marketing strategy, you can become a more effective persona-driven and persona-targeted marketer.