Successfully completing your buyer persona research is an accomplishment worth celebrating! However, it’s only the first step in the journey toward finding ways to extract value from your knowledge of the audience.
Now it’s time to start integrating that information into your marketing strategy! This will help maximize the return on your marketing investments and can open doors to reaching even more audience segments as you continue to refine your message targeting and development.
This sort of refinement is key—remember that buyer personas offer a road map, not an endpoint. You’ll still need to figure out how to boost the impact of the messaging you’re directing toward various personas.
We’ll cover four things you need to do after defining buyer personas in order to optimize their value.
1. Create Engaging Content
One of the primary benefits of understanding your buyer personas is being able to effectively tailor your content according to their preferences.
Whether you’re drafting an email, social media post, website copy, or anything else, always ask the question: Which persona is this content for, and how can I optimize it so it speaks strongly to them?
A good tactic is to start with the broadest outlines of your personas, then work your way down. For example, well-designed photo arrangements often appeal to female audiences, so start with a photo brainstorm then work your way through the details to finely target a specific persona.
Are you pitching a message to female buyers who appreciate color options? Then make sure your photo displays a variety of well-coordinated product shades.
Conversely, if you’re creating a video for male personas who value quick, actionable information, make sure to minimize the fluff and get right to the point when scripting the clip narration.
It’s also important to ensure your content is always speaking to a specific pain point or question that your personas are seeking answers for. Present a problem or desire that a given persona finds important, then position your product as the solution.
2. Communicate With Personas on Their Preferred Channels
Once you’ve created a compelling message, you need to make sure it’s sent where your audience will find it. Channel preferences are a pivotal component of buyer personas and remain your best tool for guaranteeing targeting success.
While the online world seems to get more fragmented every year, individual personas often have a clear preference for their favorite platforms or venues, so focus on those areas first.
Even the best message is wasted if it’s sent to the wrong eyes, so always remember that staying relevant to your audience means going where they “live”—whether that’s a social platform, TV network, or elsewhere.
3. Use the Right Keywords in Your Online Search Ads
Every micro-population of buyers operates within its own culture and idioms, and that includes preferences about the kind of language and wording that speaks most strongly to them. From a marketing standpoint, this means that some keywords will have very high success for one persona but may be mediocre for another.
For that reason, it’s important to mimic the exact language of your buyer personas whenever possible, and especially when it comes to keywords. Make sure to use that precise terminology in your ad copy, and always keep an eye on search trends for your most lucrative personas, so you can adjust your messaging language over time.
4. Plan Events and Partnerships Around Buyer Persona Interests
Buyer personas should determine the full scope of your marketing, including live events and brand partnerships. If your strategy includes those types of initiatives, work to ensure that the planning for those events remains centered around your buyer personas.
In some cases this might mean you have an opportunity for a partnership, then need to decide afterward which persona would appreciate it most. However, the best results usually come from targeting a specific persona from the start, then planning the event from there.
In many cases, a brand is able to include aspects that appeal to multiple personas within a single event, but don’t be afraid to keep a laser focus on a single persona if that category is one of your strongest buyer segments.
Additionally, always remember that inviting another brand into your messaging sphere can be a weighty decision. If that brand is a notably poor fit for one of your persona categories, it could actually harm your own brand with those buyers. Choose your partners well, and don’t hesitate to de-target specific personas when necessary, if you know they’re not a good fit for the partnership.
Ultimately, the value to be found within a good selection of buyer personas is what you make of it. Defining those personas is just the first step, but once armed with that information, you can use it to maximize the impact of every step you take in the marketing sphere.
From ad copy to videos, live events and more, sending the right message to the right people is the best way to extract value from your audience.
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