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It doesn’t take a marketing expert to understand that you need to think like your customers if you want to draw them to your business. One way that marketers achieve this is by creating buyer personas. A buyer persona is a hypothetical character archetype meant to represent the type of buyer you want to reach: perhaps “Martha the Stay-at-Home Mom,” “Pete the Plumber,” or “Gina the Grad Student.”
Buyer personas form the base for much of your inbound marketing efforts. When used properly, they can help you hone your marketing messages to attract your ideal customers to your business.
Personas help create the context for your messaging to ensure you’re delivering relevant content to engage with your ideal customers.
The world of sales and marketing is a rapidly evolving landscape. As technology and tools grow more sophisticated, a successful sales process will change according to new standards and best practices. When organizations don't recognize and address this fluidity, the underperforming sales may not fall entirely on the shoulders of the sales team.
Providing the right resources to promote healthy sales requires creating a culture and infrastructure that adapts to new challenges and executes a cohesive strategy throughout your entire sales process. This process is called sales enablement. You can utilize many tools to streamline your process and deliver more inbound sales with better sales enablement, but it all starts with the right content.
I have to admit something. I am a complete nerd. Star Wars, Star Trek (anything space, really), and Harry Potter are just a few of my favorites. So much so that I have read the Harry Potter books twice now. You know this and can now make a personal connection, a personalized outreach to connect. Even if I don’t know you, I will most likely open the email or read an article if you tap into my nerdom.
Business was already in flux heading into the infamous year 2020. Trends in communication emerged and shifted the marketing, sales, and service departments’ goals in almost every industry. Video-first communication, the rise of B2B podcasts, and the growing emphasis on personalized messaging are only a few examples.
The internet runs on content — relatable and engaging content the public can easily find, understand, and apply. In today’s information age, consumers have endless information at their fingertips 24/7/365. They expect more from companies than ever before, and rightfully so.
We’ve talked a lot about personas lately and understanding your customers. That’s because we believe it gets to the core of how we successfully help our customers.
These are the opening thoughts from the first issue of our new newsletter, The Basecamp. If you want to see us in your inbox every month, sign up here!
What is a buyer persona? A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.
Undergoing your first buyer persona research cycle can seem a daunting task. You have to contend with scheduling interviews, sourcing quality research, dedicating internal resources to planning and executing a persona report, and then following up on tracking personas throughout an inbound marketing campaign. There will be some experimentation involved to determine how to approach the development of personas, but with the right guidance you can skip over common persona pitfalls.