Who Are You Trusting To Build Your Buyer Personas?

If you’ve heard you need buyer personas to be effective in your marketing efforts, you’ve heard correctly. Buyer personas are indeed a key element of strategic marketing, but there’s a caveat: All personas are not created equal. Here are the “do”s and “don’t”s of how to approach this important process in order to ensure you get the most out of it.

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DON’T Put All Your Trust In Google

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For most business owners, the idea of a buyer persona is pretty straightforward. You create an imaginary person who shares the same demographics (age, job, income level, etc.) and psychographics (motivations, values, habits, etc.) as your ideal buyer. This helps you to better understand your ideal buyer and market to them more effectively.

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Since the concept is simple, you may be tempted to Google “how to create buyer personas” and then follow the advice of the first few blogs that appear. But even if they all seem to recommend the same approach, beware: if creating a buyer persona is quick or easy, it almost certainly won't be accurate or effective.

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DO Trust An Experienced Partner

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When you come to StringCan for help with your buyer personas, parts of our process may sound similar to what you read online. For example, we agree with researching your personas, segmenting them, creating a name and story for them, focusing on their roles, goals & challenges, and then ultimately using them to craft tailored digital marketing and sales strategies.

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But, the real power in this exercise comes in the first and last steps - researching and developing strategies. And that’s where we use our years of experience and proven processes to make your personas the effective tool they should be.

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DON’T Let Your Imagination Be Your Guide

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While everyone agrees that research is important for creating buyer personas, the definition of “research” differs greatly from one person to the next. Some agencies might think an hour spent looking up general market research is enough, while an in-house marketer might review past clients and extract commonalities from them. Neither of these approaches is wrong; they’re just not complete on their own.

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The problem with limited research, like in both of these cases, is that people often use their imaginations to fill in the gaps. The end result? Personas become rooted in more fiction than fact, giving you a shaky foundation to build your strategies upon. Our approach at StringCan is to conduct in-depth research like it’s our job (because, well, it is!). When we build buyer personas, we research by:

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• Analyzing your current clients

• Conducting primary qualitative research through interviews

• Surveying your current clients to gather qualitative data on processes and procedures

• Digging into your industry landscape, including your Total Addressable Market (TAM), their pain points, your competitors, and industry trends

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With this approach, we build your personas based on a complete picture of well-researched facts that you can count on. This is the single best way to create buyer personas that help you reach your goals - and we’d love to guide you in getting started. Give us a call to improve your strategic marketing and grow.