Imagine you’ve been asked to speak at an event to a group of 500 people. How do you engage each person in the room?
If you ask a public speaking expert, they’ll likely tell you to imagine the audience naked you are having a conversation with a single person. Then, they’d suggest you make eye contact with just a handful of people in the room. By taking your communication to a personal level, everyone in the room feels like you’re speaking directly to them.
Today, marketers are taking the same personalized approach.
Small business customers have become desensitized to generalized, batch & blast messaging. Instead, they expect a personalized experience based on their unique agenda, obstacles and level of interest in your business.
To deliver this personalized experience, you need to know your buyer so intimately that you understand their pain-points and can anticipate their needs.
Personas Uncover How and Why Your Customers Buy
Your target market may be hundreds, thousands, or millions of contacts. Instead of trying to formulate messaging that is generic enough to address them all, lock your sights on two or three types of people on your list.
For example, if you’re an architectural firm, your target audience may be made up of general contractors, engineers, and business owners. When you segment your list by these types of leads, you are able to address them in a more personalized, engaging way.
Take segmentation one step further.
Personas take initial segmentation one step further by assigning an archetype customer for each group. So, instead of thinking of a group of your customers as “General Contractors in the Retail Industry,” personas help you think of them as “Greg the GC.”
With a strong persona, Greg isn’t just a general contractor. He’s a 45ish guy who’s been in the business for 20 years. He’s married with 2 kids, lives in the suburbs and drives an SUV. He struggles to find good tradesmen, and his business is built on repeat customers. He is tech savvy, but finds that the latest gadgets usually aren’t rugged enough for the field, so his business is often a late adopter. His dream is to keep his business growing so that his kids can inherit it someday. His challenge is balancing business development with daily business operations.
Suddenly, you have insights into how Greg spends his days, what motivates him, and the types of problems you can help him solve. With a persona behind your content, you can create a much more compelling message for Greg and your prospects who are just like him.
Personas keep marketing on the right track.
Creating personas for the main types of people in your audience helps you to address the challenges they face and understands what motivates them to act, whether you are creating an email marketing campaign, sending out a direct mail piece, speaking at an event, or updating your website content. Offering solutions to their challenges through engaging content adds tremendous value to your prospects, converting more of them into customers so your business can grow.