The creation of actionable buyer personas allows you to identify and speak directly to your client’s target audience through valuable web content. A strict focus on the pain points and ideal solutions for the identified personas not only attracts traffic to each website but it also increases brand awareness, trust, and conversion.
Every piece of your marketing strategy can benefit from a complete persona, from website design to creating content for SEO, so it’s important to get this right.
You must master the right approach in the creation of the personas to avoid common pitfalls that could reduce the efficiency of your inbound marketing campaigns. Putting the bulk of your effort into creating the right type and number of personas will make the content creation process much more effective in the long run.
As you begin this process, make sure to avoid these five common mistakes to accurately direct your content to the target demographic for your company’s offerings.
Otherwise, you run the risk of your content completely missing the mark.
Acquisition of Incorrect or Incomplete Data
The accuracy and strength of your buyer personas directly depend on the data you collect.
If your data offers an incomplete or incorrect picture of the buyers and their journey, your personas will not accurately target the correct prospects.
Your marketing content will fail to engage and interact with the readership of the website, resulting in a noticeable decrease in traffic, repeat customers and word of mouth advertising.
To avoid this situation, you must push past simple demographics information to find actionable data that links back to the company’s product or service offerings.
Tap into the channels that the client base already utilizes, such as social media and networking platforms, to gather information about the buyer’s journey. Analyze the data from the specified pain points to the finalized purchases to gain insight about the target audience. Utilize graphs and other visual aids to gain insights from the data that would otherwise remain unnoticed or buried beneath the outstanding figures.
Failure to Tap into the Insights of Each Department
The employees who directly interact with the company’s customers have a wealth of information to share that will help give you a complete picture of who your true buyer personas are.
Talk to members of the sales team, customer service department and online community management squad to acquire the data you need. Each team may offer a piece of the puzzle that combines to create realistic and actionable buyer personas that truly help build a holistic marketing strategy.
Examine every aspect of the services offered by the team in question. When talking to the sales team, for example, ask for sales data or notes that could be helpful in defining the journey from the identification of the customer’s challenges or pain points to a solution provided by your company.
Upon approaching members of the customer service department, inquire about the various ways the company may fall short in solving the clients’ pain points. And when you’ve finished creating the finalized personas, share this important resource with the departments that helped you out to increase their marketing success as well.
Absence of Direct Customer Communications
No one is better at showing you the direct insights needed for the precise creation of buyer personas than buyers themselves – yet many marketing professionals completely skip the process of communicating with the company’s customers directly.
Without the information gathered during customer interviews, personas lack a multi-dimensional understanding of the exact purchase goals and journey of the buyer. Furthermore, insightful information derived directly from the customer base can help verify the accuracy and depth of the data sets obtained through internal and web-based research.
Work with your current clients to set up mutually beneficial interviews with their leading repeat clients. Reach out to your sales team for help securing these interviews if needed.
Many clients who are invested in the success of the company will welcome the chance to improve operations by offering astute observations about the their experience with your company. Before wrapping up the conversation, ask to keep the door open for additional interviews in case any areas of your created personas feel incomplete.
Creation of Too Many Personas
Although it seems wise to create a buyer persona for every product or service the company offers, that approach can spread your efforts far too thin and exhaust your marketing resources.
Buyer personas should reflect the overarching customer demographic, not every single entity who purchases a particular product or service. The customer pain points are an excellent place to begin when determining exactly how many personas to create.
Look at the reasons behind each customer’s visit to the website to identify the number of personas associated with the company. Analyze the proposed personas to determine if the content would overlap for those entities. If so, consider cutting one of those descriptions out of the picture.
Lack of Updates to Buyer Persona Profiles
As products and services offered by the company evolve through the years, so do the buyers who frequent that establishment. Yet, a lack of updates to buyer personas prevails in the business to business marketing environment.
Unfortunately, without readdressing the buyer persona creation process, the reach and scope of your marketing materials may start to drift the wrong direction. Digital marketing is an ever changing landscape and your marketing strategy needs to adapt with it.
In some cases, the existing buyer personas can offer direction on the process, though oftentimes, starting fresh offers the best chance at true marketing alignment. The creation process must begin again at the data collection stage to open the doors for the analysis of the existing persona.
If anything seems awry, the persona will likely need a full update to realign with the actual customer demographics for that organization.
When you work hard to avoid these five mistakes during the buyer persona creation process, you give your future marketing campaigns the best chance at success. Your marketing efforts will attract the right audience and convert visits to sales as a result of your direct efforts in the production of accurate and actionable personas.
