Putting Your Buyer Persona Interviews to Work In Your Marketing Activities

Once you’ve created your buyer persona interviews and compiled your findings, you’ve made a huge step toward effectively targeting your ideal customers. But you’re not done yet. 

The next phase is to use the information throughout your inbound marketing plan and strategy. Start with three to five of the personas you want to target first, keeping in mind that each may interact with your website, products, and services a bit differently.

Where to Use Buyer Personas in Your Marketing Strategy

As a quick refresher, a buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer.

The TL;DR of this blog is that you should use your buyer personas throughout your entire marketing strategy. Why? If you’re not considering your customers, you’ll end up targeting the wrong audience, which is basically the same as targeting no audience at all. 

You’ve spent a lot of time curating these buyer persons — let’s put them to good use. Here are six places you can incorporate the findings of your personas.

On Your Website 

Every aspect of your website should focus on solving problems your personas may have. This can be done by:

• Auditing existing content to ensure it aligns with the solutions and information desired by different personas and eliminating or creating content if it doesn’t
• Using dynamic content that lets you tailor your site to different personas when they visit
• Optimizing or creating landing pages for specific personas

When updating or creating pages for specific personas, pay particular attention to the language they use as well as the graphic style and imagery that would best grab their attention. Both page copy and graphics should be aligned with personas likely to land there. 

Top it off with simple labels for easy-to-follow navigation that leads them in the direction they need to go. 

In Your Content Marketing 

When creating new content as part of your content marketing strategy, make sure each piece of content is geared toward a specific customer persona. Again, you want to answer their pain points and questions while guiding them toward your solution. 

Add another layer of specificity to your marketing messages by researching and using keywords each persona may search for on Google. Tailored content can include: 

• Ebooks and other gated content: Each ebook, guide, or downloadable content can solve a common problem or address a recurring question found within each persona. Promote each piece of content to the appropriate audience through landing pages, social media, or email. 
• Blogs: Blog posts tailored to specific types of customers are an ideal place to use long-tail keywords for which different personas may be searching. Some may have specific problems or solutions in mind; make sure they can find both with your posts. 

With Social Media Promotion

Applying your persona knowledge to your social media strategy involves knowing what type of content is most likely to grab the attention of a specific persona. But it also involves being aware of which social media sites the persona frequents and when. 

Your persona interviews clarified where your personas spend their time online. Use that information to push content on the appropriate sites during peak times. Go even further by making sure you or a team member is monitoring those sites during peak persona times, networking, responding to questions, and otherwise engaging with targeted audience members as needed.

In Your Advertising

Just as each persona may have different social media habits, each is likely to have different preferences for online and offline news sources, publications, and other sources of information. Ads in industry magazines and websites, specific social media sites, and entertainment or lifestyle publications can be hot spots for targeting customers. 

Once you’ve determined where to find your persona, create a new budget or reallocate your existing budget to put ads where your persona can find you.

With Your Email Strategy

Creating targeted lists of your personas lets you send emails when you know each persona will be online. Boost your strategy even further by determining: 

• When they check their emails
• When they’re likely to take action or otherwise respond to emails
• What device they use to check emails, whether on a computer or their phones
• What information they would be most interested in receiving 
• The tone and voice they prefer (conversational versus formal)

The most effective email strategy involves sending the right content at the right time to the right persona. Your targeted lists give a great head start in fulfilling all three. 

At Conferences and Tradeshows

Conferences and tradeshows can be a bonanza for face-to-face opportunities with your personas — not only for presenting solutions but also for learning even more about them. 

Plan on attending conferences and tradeshows your personas frequently, armed with information, presentations, and solutions tailored to their specific pain points. You may even find a new group of people you didn’t think to target before!

When to Update Your Buyer Personas

Almost as important as creating buyer personas, updating them regularly will keep you current in the industry and with your competitors.

Four big moments you should consider updating yours include:

• After a merger or acquisition
• If your target audience changes
• There’s a shift in business strategy
• Your products or services change

Don’t Neglect Your Buyer Personas!

Having a good grasp of your different buyer personas can not only make your content marketing more effective, but it can become much easier to create. You already have a fundamental knowledge of the persona’s background, job, habits, likes, and dislikes. Now all you need to do is address their pain points and offer a solution in a way that best aligns with who they are and what they need.

You can create buyer personas using HubSpot’s free buyer persona tool, or you can reach out to us for help. Lynton has years of experience creating and implementing personas into successful marketing campaigns. Get started today!