You know you need buyer personas (and if you didn’t, you can check out how to get started with them here), but how can you ensure that your buyer personas will actually target the right customers? Watch this video to find out.
If you’d rather read than watch the video, the complete transcript is below. (But, honestly, why read when you could watch?)
There’s one thing that your buyer personas need to align with before you get too far down the road in creating them.
This is about vision. And it’s about making sure that when you’re working on your buyer personas, you’re actually targeting the customer your company wants to reach. We’ve talked to a bunch of people who do work on their personas, and then they find out, “Well, actually our company wants to work with this kind of customer instead. Now we have to scrap everything.” Really all of the inbound marketing you’ve done to that point has been wasted.
So instead, I’m going to give you six questions that you should ask your leadership before you create those personas (or you can fix them). That will help make sure that your inbound marketing is effective in bringing the right kind of customers to your website. So, here we go.
- Have we locked in to our most profitable and loyal customer base?
- In the next 1-2 years, are we trying to sell into a new market or vertical? Broaden or narrow our focus? Change our target demographic?
- How do we identify these new potential customers?
- How is our current service/product being repositioned to serve those new customers?
- Are there new products or services on the horizon that will reach this new demographic?
- How will our current messaging reflect these new opportunities?
I didn’t list six questions because that’s all you should ask—those are the six that came to my mind as I was preparing for this and as we work with our clients. I would love hear of some other questions that you’ve thought of, that you need to ask your leadership before you develop these personas. The key is, whatever you talk about will affect who you attract to your site.
There was a movie back in the 1990s called “Field of Dreams,” and the phrase that came out of that was, “If you build it, they will come.” So with inbound marketing, if you talk about it, they will come. So make sure your personas are aligned with what your leadership wants to do, that you’re reaching the right customers, and that you talk about the right problems and solutions they’re looking for.
What questions have you asked yourself (or your boss) before developing your organization’s buyer personas? Let me know in the comment section below or on Twitter @nectafy!
(And because everybody loves bloopers, here’s what goes on behind the scenes when we’re filming!)
