Three reasons buyer personas are critical to capturing clients in a post-2020 world

The topic of buyer personas brings mixed reactions from marketers. Some get really excited. Others scratch their heads. After all, when you’re doing market research and collecting customer data from sales, isn’t that enough to inform your product marketing strategy?

Not really.

According to the industry and the metrics, customer profiling in the form of secondary research, analyst reports and other public information is only the start of an effective strategy.

Buyer personas — research-based, detailed archetypes drawn from direct conversations with your ideal clients — take that research to the next level. They help you to not only know who your buyers are, but to understand what’s important to them. Based on real-life people (and not just their LinkedIn profile), personas bring your target clients to life, give them a face and a name, and reinforce the “why” behind your company’s marketing decisions.

Here are just three ways personas can improve your business’s performance:

1. Compelling user experiences. A tailored experience built around your target segment’s  specific needs goes a long way in helping to simplify the customer journey. According to a Hubspot report, email click-throughs and conversion rates both increased by double digits when customized. And the use of marketing personas made websites 2-5 times more effective and easier to use by targeted users.
2. Effective messaging. In a digital-saturated world, it makes sense that a customized campaign is more likely to make a strong impression, and the numbers support the hypothesis. When surveyed, buyers were actually 48% more likely to consider solution providers that personalized their marketing to address specific business issues.
3. Accelerated sales. The Hubspot report cited a case study that demonstrated the use of targeted personas boosted sales leads by 124%. And in a Cintell study, the majority of high-performing B2B organizations reported leveraging buyer personas as part of their sales process and training. Bottom line… Buyer personas bridge the gap between customer information and customer motivation — and they can also bridge the gap between leads and conversions.

Personas took center stage for a client of ours recently when we helped them expand their B2B business to a new retail market.

Amy Hagar, Head of Brand Strategy at Crossover Health, explains:

We knew our target audience would have unique needs and challenges, and needed a starting point for messaging and strategy. As a scale-up company we had never formally done this before.These steps were useful:

• Hypothesize. We started internally making assumptions about who our personas were and what their customer journeys would look like.
• Confirm. We employed a survey to confirm our thinking and add needed detail to our personas.
• Test. A soft launch testing phase gave further insight into our personas, using ads for specific services, messaging and offers.

As a result of this process, we have a pretty good sense of who our audience is, and can take a more targeted approach to driving leads and conversions with specific messaging. Our product team benefits from learning about our audience’s wants and needs and when they tend to make purchasing decisions — so our products can be tailored more accurately.

We also applied this information to the user experience on our new retail website and we know we will continue to use it going forward as we launch new offers and services to our retail customers.

In a post-2020 world, where the rules of B2B sales have shifted dramatically, there’s never been a better time to think about developing well-crafted buyer personas.

Got questions? Contact one of our archers to be sure your marketing strategy is hitting all the right notes.