Market research firm Yankelovich estimates that consumers are exposed to as many as 5,000 marketing messages a day. The number might seem exaggerated, but there’s no arguing that modern businesses have to break through a high barrier of noise to capture our attention. According to HiP, a B2B lead generation agency, behaviorally targeted ads are twice as effective as non-targeted ads.
In other words, this means you shouldn’t randomly create marketing content without knowing exactly who your audience is. Spreading marketing content without knowing the audience’s specific wants, needs, preferences, and worldviews is a great way to suffer financial loss. Knowing and understanding who is likely to need your product or service is a must if you hope to see a return-on-investment with media content. According to
According to HiP, a B2B lead generation agency, behaviorally targeted ads are twice as effective as non-targeted ads. In other words, this means you shouldn’t randomly create marketing content without knowing exactly who your audience is.
Spreading marketing content without knowing the audience’s specific wants, needs, preferences, and worldviews is a great way to suffer financial loss. Knowing and understanding who is likely to need your product or service is a must if you hope to see a return-on-investment with media content. According to
Knowing and understanding who is likely to need your product or service is a must if you hope to see a return-on-investment with media content. According to research by marketing forum ITSMA, buyers are 48 percent more likely to consider solutions that personalize their marketing tactics to address specific business issues. Charles E. Gaudet II, founder & CEO of Predictable Profits, writes in Forbes:
A more effective approach would be to determine which fish you wanted to catch. Are you deep sea fishing for marlin or fly-fishing for trout? It’s going to make quite a difference where you choose to fish. And what you’re after will determine the rest of your approach. If you really want to bring home a good catch, consider when the fish will be breeding. You’ll need the right bait, the right rig, even the right time of day. You have to do your research.
By better understanding the targeted audience, you can better anticipate their reaction to a particular content technique. This might not be possible when you’re not the kind of person your business targets. When this happens, you have to create what’s known in the industry as a buyer persona.
“A buyer persona is a visual representation or tool that helps businesses understand their customers. This not only includes demographic information like age, location, and income, but also psychological attributes such as interests, reasons for buying, and concerns,” says Anggriawan Sugianto,
This not only includes demographic information like age, location, and income, but also psychological attributes such as interests, reasons for buying, and concerns,” says Anggriawan Sugianto, CTO, and COO of a Jakarta-based digital agency Suitmedia, in an interview with Content Collision. Sugianto’s firm has been around in Indonesia for quite some time, and many locals recognize the agency as the firm that incubated the archipelago’s famous online marketplace Bukalapak.
According to Demand Gen Report, creating a buyer persona leads to a 48 percent more cost effective campaign than those without buyer personas. Painting a picture of your audience makes it easier to tailor your content, product development, and services to the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of different groups. Using buyer personas in email campaigns tends to improve open rates by two times and click through rates by five times, says MLT Creative.
When executed correctly, a buyer persona
Delivers the right message
Non-targeted marketing tries to engage everyone and no one in particular. This is most often wrong. When you have identified your buyer persona, only then can you provide a solution that seems to perfectly fit their needs, with the language they are used to hearing.
Minimizes advertising waste
Knowing which television stations, online media, and other channels through which to send your message will let you better match it with an audience that fits the criteria.
Helps you discover flaws before it’s too late
If you understand your buyer’s most common objections to pulling the trigger, you can include the solutions to these objections in your marketing efforts. Testimonials that come from people who fit your buyer persona suddenly seem more credible.
A recent MarketingSherpa case study found that buyer personas for online businesses, on average, accounted for a 900 percent increase in time spent on the page, a 171 percent bump in marketing-generated revenue, a 111 percent jump in e-mail open rates, and a 100 percent surge in the number of pages visited. “Buyer personas are not a trend yet in Indonesia, but more digital agencies have started using them to create a marketing plan,” Sugianto explains.
“As for large companies in Indonesia, it’s not that popular yet, because they already have a clear and specific target market. A buyer persona is most useful when businesses are searching for a specific target customer for their new product.”
6 steps to building a buyer personas
Source the data
To understand potential customers’ thoughts, behaviors, buying patterns — as well as their inner “why” — you need a creative data sourcing method. Collecting data from surveys is one way, interviewing via phone and in-person is another. Social media listening is also becoming one of the fastest ways to see if there’s water in a certain well.
Focus on digging out personal information, demographics, interests, motivations, challenges, pain points, and objections. When sourcing this kind of information, tools like Google Forms and SurveyMonkey are sure to come into play.
Visualize your audience
Identify your ideal market segment by distinguishing between your different “buyer types.” Focus on assigning unique attributes to these different types. Segmentation should be based on common characteristics, shared by a specific group of people.
For example, if you’re targeting middle-class millennial mothers in Indonesia, your strategy is going to be drastically different from the one you use if you’re targeting middle-aged men in Singapore. Hint, when communicating internally, give them a special visual token or nickname to help your team understand these different groups.
Define their challenges
Find out what frustrates your audience and think of how to solve these problems. To set the right path for persona development, try walking in their shoes to understand their emotions, and how they feel about these problems. If you can shadow someone for a day who fits your target buyer, developing a products to serve their needs is sure to become easier.
Discover key objections
Respond to objections raised toward your product. For every group, try to identify what stops them from buying. Is your product more expensive than your competitor’s? How can you make it cheaper? Also, be sure to clearly explain what makes your product superior. This step should help you discover your buyer’s likes and dislikes, as well as their overall attitude toward your product.
Identify the right channels
Discover the marketing channels that will most likely reach a particular audience type. Which channel has highest conversion rate? Is there a niche website associated with your audience? Are you trying to reach businesses or consumers? For example, if you’re purely a B2B firm, LinkedIn may be a more effective social media channel than Facebook or Twitter.
Apply personas of your fish
Develop a customized marketing campaign that transforms these buyer personas into actual audience members. Understand the steps your audience must take before buying your product. Address their concerns through a newly informed content strategy.
Sugianto says, “Compared to usual market research, buyer personas have more advantages in visualizing and summarizing all the attributes into a simple and structured page, slide, or picture. Also, it focuses more on psychological attributes and places people into types, such as ‘A Family Man’ and so on.”
