5 Tips for Targeting Your Market with Buyer Personas
Posted by Christine Parizo on Mon, Aug 15, 2011
Buyer personas – the idea that you emphasize people, not the sale – pervades 
content marketing. When you’re writing your documentation, blogs and other collateral, you want to focus on the people reading it, not merely pushing for a sale.
When your prospects read the copy, they’re thinking how they can benefit from it, not how to help you, and that’s where you need to create intriguing buyer personas. Marketing with buyer personas isn’t always easy, however. Here are five tips to target your market and make the sale while still focusing on the person behind the decision:
1. Sketch out who is behind the decision. Think about who your ideal customer actually is. Once again, the content marketing strategy behind buyer personas is to find out what motivates this ideal customer. Find out her title – VP? C-level? Middle manager? Once you have that information, you can better create a buyer persona.
2. Paint a picture of your target customer’s problem. Your ideal customer has a unique set of problems. When preparing your content, think about how you can solve her problems. Find out her motivations for choosing a solution, what blogs or newspapers she reads for information, and how she makes business decisions. Ask questions, and probe deeply into what she needs. Have these questions handy for the next step.
3. Engage with your target customer at all possible opportunities. Content marketing with buyer personas involves asking direct questions. Reach your target market through LinkedIn groups, create online surveys, and monitor and participate in blogs and forums to leverage all possible contact points. Here’s where you ask your questions to find out what to include in your content. This is the single best way to get answers to your questions. That way, you can create a very rich buyer persona that transcends a simple customer profile.
4. Translate your goals into the buyer personas. The whole point of a buyer persona is to identify your ideal customer and market to her. Once you’ve created a very thorough, deep persona, compare how her needs line up to your company’s goals. Think about and strategize as to how you can sell to this persona, using the information you’ve gleaned and the goals you’ve set as a company. Always remember, however, that the buyer wants to know what’s in it for her, not what’s in it for you.
5. Revise your personas regularly. Cultivating buyer personas isn’t a one-time deal. To really continue to enhance your content marketing strategy, you’ll need to revise the personas on a regular basis. Keep researching your ideal customer’s problems, how to solve her problems, and how she’s making her decisions, and use that information to update the persona. Continual revision and upkeep is key to marketing to her.
With these five tips, you can set forth a strategy that not only resonates with your customer but drives sales. Buyer personas do require more work than a simple customer profile, but the results are worth every minute you spend on creating the persona and marketing to your ideal customer.