Created Buyer Personas? Here’s What To Do Next

By Brittany Lieu, Marketing Consultant at Heinz Marketing

So after many hours and iterations, your team has landed on the perfected set of buyer personas. Detailed with pain points, goals, job responsibilities and attitudes, these personas represent who you want to market to. 

Now what? 

After putting in the work, don’t let these buyer personas be lost as just a “marketing exercise”. Here are 5 ways to ensure they don’t go to waste.

Make Them Known

Information is only useful if it can be understood. Make sure the personas you have painstakingly crafted get shared with the teams that will benefit from them most – those that are interacting with prospects or relevant marketing materials and initiatives. Ensure that everyone knows where to access the most up-to-date version and understands how to best use the persona documents you’ve designed. 

Build the Buyer’s Journey

Once you’ve nailed down your personas and have a clear understanding of how to messaging to each one uniquely, it’s time to develop the buyer’s journey. In short, a buyer’s journey is a visual map that showcases what challenge and benefit messages best resonate with a particular persona on their path to purchase from the awareness stage through consideration and decision stage. Documenting a process like this allows your sales and marketing teams to know how and when to engage with prospects meaningfully. Read more about the core components of a robust B2B buyer’s journey here. 

Create More Targeted Ads

Now that you have a better definition of who your target customer is in terms of psychographics, demographics, industry, job role and company size, go back to your database and start categorizing by persona. By bucketing contacts into persona groups, you can better tailor messaging for those individuals. With defined list segmentation, you can go further and structure marketing campaigns and programs directed at reaching certain personas with content offers that will bring them the most value.

Create Content Strategically

Deliver highly-personalized content through highly targeted means. Create content strategically now that you know exactly what motivates your ideal buyer and what they find important. However, you can’t start creating new content without first knowing what content already exists. Before you jump into developing blog posts, video content, ebooks, whitepapers or webinar series to align with specific personas, conduct a content audit. This comprehensive process will allow you to gain insight on the current distribution of topics and persona messaging. If you are strapped for time, learn more about how to run a quick content audit here.

Once you know what you are working with, select content from your repository that makes the most sense for each persona as you dive into campaign planning. Think about what language, format and channels align with each buyer persona. 

Update Your Personas Regularly

Your buyer personas are always working documents. Don’t settle for one version you created years ago and pretend that the industry and customers aren’t ever-changing. Create a cadence for regular review and updates as you gain new data about buyers and grow as a business. What’s also important is keeping your sales and marketing team in the loop as you edit and evolve your personas.

Get Started on What’s Next

Don’t let your hard work go to waste. After researching, drafting and socializing your buyer persona work, get the most out of your personas by leveraging them strategically!

 

Check out related reads below!