Are Your Buyer Personas Growing Mold?

Check out the video recap of our post here!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVk5xWJ1M1E

You’ve invested a ton of time and resources into your marketing, and it can be frustrating when you’re not seeing the results you expected from your advertising efforts. Making things worse is when you see your competitors’ advertising seems more creative and effective than yours. What gives? Remember those buyer personas you created? Are they growing mold, forgotten and sad in the dark recesses of your cloud storage? If you’re looking for ways to improve your marketing, engaging in truly targeted advertising is one of the best methods. It all starts (and restarts) with the almighty buyer persona.

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Dial Them In

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First, think about where your buyer personas currently stand. Do you even have them at all? Are they well-defined? If not, here are the nuts and bolts of putting together profiles of your ideal customers that will help you better market to them.

Second, consider the depth of your buyer personas. Do your personas only include basic demographic information like job title, approximate age and location, but nothing deeper? The best buyer personas are more nuanced and include psychographic information as well. This can encompass things like hobbies, spending habits, mindset and more. This helps drives more targeted advertising for certain platforms like display and programmatic.

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Revisit and Revise

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When was the last time you updated your personas? Are they starting to stink up your storage? In order to make this practice effective, they should be dynamic. Your personas should evolve as your company does, and as the information you have about your buyers expands.

A solid goal for revisiting personas is once per year, at a minimum. At this time, you may need to update just a few details about them, or you may find you need to eliminate an entire persona and build a new one in its place. When you review your existing personas, take a look at your top customers from the past year. These should include customers who spent the most money with your company, as well as customers that were a great fit for other reasons. Do your personas reflect these ideal customers? If not, they should, or else you’ll have trouble attracting more customers like them.

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Update Your Advertising Campaigns

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Once your personas are updated, you’ll need to adjust your targeted advertising to cater to them. Let’s say you’ve realized one of your personas is much younger than you initially thought. You then might decide to move your ad budget away from print advertising to social advertising. Then, you could target this age group specifically on platforms known to be most popular with people in that age range. Once you make the switch, be sure to regularly measure the results to see if it was the right choice.

You’ll find that revisiting your buyer personas could be just the thing you need to get a more targeted advertising approach - and improve your results along with it. Need help creating, or updating, your personas and adjusting your advertising strategy to match? We can help you through any stage of the buyer persona development process, just give us a call.

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Key Takeaways:

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• Refine your buyer personas to include more detail, like psychographic information

• Don’t let your hard work collect dust

• Refine your personas at least once per year

• Update your advertising efforts to focus on your revised personas