I was recently conducting a series of interviews for a new client, speaking with their customers and resellers to help prepare an Inbound Marketing Strategy. 

Regular readers know that I’ve always been an advocate of buyer personas and the Inbound Culture. But as I was interviewing each person I was reminded once again about the power of talking with leads, clients and customers to reveal powerful marketing insights. 

Within minutes of speaking to each person I had gathered insights I couldn’t have come up with on my own. They shared specific details about their research and purchasing habits, what they were looking for and what ultimately motivated them to make a particular purchasing decision.

This information will be priceless in developing buyer personas for my new client, which will ultimately inform a detailed marketing and content strategy. 

Taking the time to develop buyer personas and understand a prospective customer’s individual attitudes takes the guesswork out of marketing, building a platform to launch a targeted sales and marketing strategy. It’s a process that would benefit almost any business. Here’s why:

Knowing Your Customer

Buyer personas reveal the deeper motivations of your buyers, unlocking ways you can create marketing campaigns that truly resonate with them. By understanding what your customers are trying to achieve, you can align your content to help them reach their goals and overcome their challenges.

It’s an essential part of marketing to prospective customers, according to HubSpot’s Lindsay Kolowich.

“Buyer personas are a crucial component of successful inbound marketing, particularly for the sales and marketing departments,” Kolowich says. “After all, the marketing team needs to know to whom they are marketing, and the sales team needs to know to whom they are selling.” 

Drive Web Visits, Generate Leads, Close Deals

The whole philosophy of Inbound Marketing is to create content people love. If you know exactly who you’re marketing to, how to reach them and the kind of content they respond to, it makes sense that you’ll see a spike in your key marketing metrics. 

Consider These Statistics From HubSpot:

• Behaviourally targeted ads are twice as effective as non-targeted ads.
• Buyer Personas made websites 2 - 5 times more effective and easier to use by targeted users
• Personalised emails drive 18 times more revenue than broadcast emails.
• Personalised emails improve click-through rates by 14% and conversion rates by 10%.

Skytap, a self-service provider of cloud automation solutions, implemented a targeted content marketing strategy and saw the following results:

• 124% increased sales leads
• 55% increase in organic search traffic
• 97% increase in online leads
• 210% increase in North American site traffic.

A More Targeted Approach For Small Business

Resources and budgets are precious and typical SMEs don’t have the time or money to waste on strategies that offer questionable return on investment. This is where buyer personas are especially powerful. 

Buyer personas help you understand where your customers spend their time online, the challenges they face, their trusted sources of information, and their purchasing criteria.

Knowing this information allows you to target your content and promote it in places your prospective customers are most likely to see it. The prospects you want to reach are more likely to engage with content that interests them if it's found in the channels they are already using.