Have you made your buyer personas yet?
A couple of weeks ago, the Grammar Chic blog offered some quick tips on creating buyer personas—explaining that buyer personas are essentially “summaries of the individual and identifiable groups of people who might be interested in buying your products.” When you develop a buyer persona, you are profiling one specific segment of your consumer population, listing things like gender, age, income level, hobbies and interests, purchasing motivation, and so forth.
Creating buyer personas helps you to be better informed in your content marketing endeavors. The catch, of course, is that it’s really only valuable to you if you use that information—so what are some specific and practical ways in which you can use your buyer personas to inform your content marketing? We’ve listed five strategies in the bullet points that follow.
Using Your Buyer Personas
Once you’ve made your buyer personas, here’s how you use ‘em:
- Address specific people. Sending out an email newsletter is less effective when you have to address it with an anonymous “you,” or when your message can’t be targeted to address the specific needs of your clients—but when you can talk to specific groups instead of the general consumer population, it makes your message sharper, clearer. At Grammar Chic, for instance, we use buyer personas to tailor some content toward job seekers who might be interested in our resume services; other content is geared toward small business owners. By using buyer personas, we can ensure that all of it is geared toward a specific rather than a general audience.
- Position your product as the solution to a specific problem. What kinds of problems do your consumers deal with? Your buyer personas should tell you—and then you should use your content marketing to position your product as the solution to their problems. If your buyer personas suggest that your customers are all busy, on-the-go professionals, then, it might be smart to position your product as something that will spare them time and hassle.
- Speak to certain values and beliefs. Again, your buyer personas should reveal some potential avenues for you here. If you’re manufacturing food products and you know that your customers are often parents, you can use content to appeal to their desire to offer healthy and nutritional foods to their kids.
- Put your content in the right place. Buyer personas don’t just tell you who your customers are, but where they are. Dealing with small business owners? Then you need some content on LinkedIn. Dealing with crafty, stay-at-home moms? Then Pinterest is the place for you to be.
- Offer the best value. A final thing that your buyer personas should tell you is the approximate affluence level of your customers—which will enable you to showcase products and services that are actually affordable. You don’t want to promote your high-end products to your most budget-strapped customers, and with buyer personas, you don’t have to.
The bottom line is that buyer personas are useful at nearly every stage of the content development cycle—so get to work on yours today! For assistance in buyer persona development or implementation, contact the Grammar Chic team: Visit www.grammarchic.net or call 803-831-7444.
Amanda E. Clark founded Grammar Chic in 2008. She is a graduate of Eastern Michigan University and holds degrees in Journalism, Political Science, and English. She launched Grammar Chic after freelancing for several years while simultaneously leading marketing and advertising initiatives for several Fortune 500 companies.