Boost Your Business with Lead Nurturing and Buyer Personas
If you want to boost your business online you first need to get to know your target audience and ideal clientele. Creating buyer personas and using them together with lead nurturing strategy is a great way to move forward.
In order to effectively apply your marketing strategies and convert your prospective leads, you need to know who you’re marketing to.
Essentially, buyer personas can help you focus your attention on hot leads only. A buyer persona is a concept that describes your ideal target market.
Thanks to different lead demographics, you can efficiently create different marketing strategies for each buyer persona you want to hire.
If you want to learn more about how to create positive and negative buyer personas, use them to your advantage, avoid mistakes, etc. read on.
How to create buyer personas
In general, you have two main types of buyer personas — positive and negative. Positive personas are those that you want to market to, that you want to convert. On the other hand, negative personas describe client profiles that you don’t want to convert.
You may think that a negative buyer persona is a redundant characterization. However, there will always be people who sign up for your offers for their own personal reasons with no intent to ever choose you (purchase your products/services).
The easiest way to get the information you need in order to create buyer personas is through surveys and interviews. In general, you need to ask your current as well as prospective clients about various topics such as jobs, family, personal and professional future goals and plans, gender, age, location, preferred communication, and social media as well as their expectations of companies within your particular business niche. Use their answers for buyer persona database.
How to use buyer personas
Once you have all the necessary info for your buyer personas, you can combine them with different lead stages.
Essentially, buyer personas help you specify your marketing efforts and content for a particular group of leads.
Since your leads are all in different stages and they all have their own unique personas, you can minimize the cost of your marketing strategies yet effectively create the perfect content for each persona and stage group in your lead email list.
Negative buyer personas are very useful when it comes to allocating your budget to high-quality leads. If you want to lower your CPH, take the time to create negative buyer personas as well.
To simplify:
Mark an objective for your buyer persona
Naturally, you want to cover most of the possible public, but it is more efficient and you will report more benefits when targeting a specific profile based on the buying habits, needs, opinions, etc. Only then can you specialize in your business and respond better to the demands.
Study your clientele
You may already have a certain idea of how each customer profile behaves because of what you experience in your line of work.
But you must not forget that you have to study your customers through your own surveys, and even other companies’ surveys, to get an idea of how they behave and engage with businesses.
This should be done without losing the sense of your own intuition, of course. Such a practice does not exempt you from making mistakes, but a combination of both strategies is often the best.
Apply a funnel
The funnel (filter + tunnel) is a filtering process that you can do as the prospect makes a certain routine in the buying process:
- Perception: This is the first step when the client realizes that they have a need to satisfy.
- Decision making: Once the customer has identified the need, they begin to analyze different options. That is when you must launch the messages to attract them to your own product.
- Take action: This is the time to act and engage the prospect. Offer discounts and options that positively reinforce your product/service and make it more appealing compared to the competition.
Through this kind of filtering, you define your audience and, with it, the strategy that you want to follow.
Try not to include more people and demographics as soon as you start converting more leads. Creating a buyer persona and target audience is something that you need to employ for many business stages to come.
Do not let customers adapt to your strategy, products, and messages, but make them know all the aspects of your business.
Lead nurturing to the rescue
Thanks to lead nurturing, you can effectively attract attention to your own business without bothering your leads. Take a look at the most effective ways to nurture your leads and boost your business by using this strategy.
Nurture your leads gradually with email marketing
Email marketing is one of the most powerful forms of digital advertising. It allows you to present your content directly to your prospective leads.
However, successful lead nurturing is not the same for every single lead you have in your company email list. You have to create sub-lists for your leads at different stages.
Those who have subscribed to you recently need to get familiar with your company first. On the other hand, you can effectively send out emails with open and strong calls-to-action to your very warm leads who are just steps away from converting.
Retargeting strategy for lead nurturing
Retargeting is also a very valuable strategy that can constantly remind your warm leads of your company offers. Essentially, retargeting means that you can use pixel-based tracking and place your ads in front of your audience.
Anyone who visits your website is a candidate for this type of retargeting strategy.
Moreover, lead nurturing can be done if you retarget your email list as well. Use email addresses of your subscribers on Facebook so that they receive your company’s ads in their news feed.
Of course, to improve this strategy even more, make sure to set up parameters for different lead demographics.
Utilize social media to the fullest
Lead nurturing means that you have to put some effort into engaging with your prospective clients on social media.
While creating great social media posts is essential, you also need to communicate with your audience. Respond to their comments and encourage interactions when possible.
One of the best social media nurturing tricks is to monitor relevant keywords. Essentially, you can set up a stream that will notify you every time someone on social media is looking for a product/service you offer. That way you can be the first to respond and present your own company as a solution.
Pay attention to the following lead nurturing mistakes:
You skip the analysis phase
When it comes to attracting potential clients, understanding your ideal prospect profile is crucial. You cannot sell your products/services without doing an analysis of your own company or the competition.
This will help you learn what type of user you’re after. In turn, when you get a series of interested leads, it is equally important to investigate the circumstances of conversion to better understand what actions prompted your prospects to do that.
You don’t update your lead magnet
A lead magnet is quality content that the company offers for free in exchange for the personal data of interested users. Failure to keep this information up-to-date could result in loss of interest. It can also cause lower positioning and visibility for your target audience.
For instance, if some clients are interested in your offers, you want to capture their info in order to utilize email marketing and send information about your business that can finally convert them.
You fail to launch an email campaign
You may not have trouble catching potential clients, but what are you doing to turn them into converted, loyal ones?
Carrying out an email marketing strategy will make a good impression on the users who have been pleasantly surprised with your website.
It’s the email campaigns that can make a difference between clients choosing you and choosing your competition. Failing to set up a proper email marketing strategy is one of the biggest lead nurturing mistakes that you can make.
You dismiss tracking
What happens to prospects who do not get involved with your business right away? They may need time to think about it.
Studies show that around 50% of users are not monitored, which usually means that most of them end up choosing the competitor.
This situation can be easily solved using tools such as a CRM system.
Many businesses disregard this type of marketing. However, all businesses who want to promote themselves online can benefit from it.
You don’t analyze or adjust your campaigns
This may be a complex process but it generates the biggest number of leads as well. Carrying out a thorough analysis of your results and statistics can be a tedious and very stressful task.
Fortunately, today there are tools that can help you do a full study and find out how to maximize your conversions with the push of a button.
