Most companies allocate 6% to 14% of their total revenue to marketing, with B2Cs generally spending more than B2Bs. Regardless, marketing represents a big slice of an organization’s overall spending. Thus, you don’t want to waste all that money on the wrong target audience.
You certainly don’t want to deliver high-value content to people who don’t need your products or services or are not in a good position to buy them. If you want to close deals, you must recognize who your ideal customers are. Knowing who your ideal customers give you an inkling of who your potential buyers really are.
This is where buyer personas come in.
You Don’t Have to Market to Everyone
- Traditional marketing conventions focus on casting a wide net and hoping for a large catch. In shotgun terms, “spray and pray”.
- Buyer personas give you a clear picture of who your ideal customers are based on your own business requirements and extremely specific customer data.
- By definition, a buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer, a composite person of many different people who share similar goals and challenges and have the same buyer journeys.
- Even though personas are fictional, they allow you and your marketing team to discover who to target. This results in more successful marketing campaigns and increased conversions.
Make Your Brand More Human
- Because marketing personas are representations of real people whose desires, expectations, problems, struggles, and pain points can be solved by your product, you and your marketing team are able to relate to them not just as prospects, but as human beings.
- When you are able to do that, and relate to them as humans, you can personalize your approach so much better because your personalization is not just fueled by data and insights, but by human nature as well.
- This is quite crucial as B2B consumers now expect brands to deliver on-demand personalized content and experiences more than ever.
- An estimated 80% of B2B marketers say personalization allows them to engage buyers more effectively. Another study shows that 82% of customers said they would go for a brand that quickly turns and caters to their needs.
- Accurate buyer personas help B2B marketers craft branded yet highly personalized messaging. So personal and intimate that each message resonates deeply with its target audience. Personas allow marketers to make tailored strategies and content to best align and meet the goals, needs, and values of their consumers.
Steer Clear of Non-Buyers
- Reversibly, buyer personas can also help you identify individuals you don’t want as customers, referred to as negative or exclusionary personas.
- This type of persona represents (for example) researchers who engage just to gain knowledge about your products; or customers whose acquisition costs are too high or have a very high inclination to churn.
- When your brand has a picture of people you want to avoid, it prevents you and your marketing team from wasting money, time, resources, and effort on people who never needed your product or service in the first place.
Targeting The Right People = Smart Marketing
To craft and deliver marketing messages and promotions that really resound with the audience and empower them to action, businesses must first know and understand who their customers are. They must have their feet inside their shoes, walk a few miles, and gain their perspective.
Buyer personas help your business not just visualize your buyers, but also remind you that your customers are people. Many brands have often made the error of concentrating too much on their product or service.
They often forget that closing more deals is all about finding the right people who need their product. It’s all about recognizing their motivations, what they want to solve, what they need, and who they really are.
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